


The Sentry and the Saint

by beekeepercain



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Asexual Character, Asexuality, Blood and Injury, Brothers, Cuddling, Depression, Developing Relationship, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Men of Letters Bunker, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Other, Post-Episode: s09e23 Do You Believe In Miracles?, Queerplatonic Relationships, Questioning, Soul Bond, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-09
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-02-04 00:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 48,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1760887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beekeepercain/pseuds/beekeepercain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"I need you to take care of him. It's chaos up there, Sam. I can't trust anyone. Not yet. Not with him. But I trust you. I know I can trust you. All I ask for is that you try."</i>
</p><p>He was as Sam had been: torn from the inside out, broken beyond repair. This was the state in which Gadreel had breathed life into him, and now the least he could do was to return the favour as well as a human being could. And just like him, Sam knew Gadreel had made this choice himself, but it only seemed fitting - he'd been denied his death. Now Gadreel, as far as Sam was concerned, would have his denied in turn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> A month ago, I got a prompt to write Sadreel fluff. There was A12 happening so it got delayed, and I only returned in time for the finale, and let's just say the finale did not exactly put me in mood for fluff. A little later, I decided to write this prompt to feel better, maybe fix some stuff, the usual. Tops 6 000 words. Well whoops, it's 48 000 and although it has some fluffy elements, it's, err, not fluff. Not fluff at all. Yay.
> 
> This is a fic that doesn't have a pairing, but for which the pairing tag is necessary.  
> This is literally a fic exploring the concept of staying in bed for a week.  
> This is a nearly 50k fic with just three characters.  
> This is a fic that shouldn't exist.  
> This is a fic about things.
> 
> You're welcome.

[ ](http://shieldofeden.tumblr.com/post/89135816978/i-promise-you-i-will-learn-from-my-mistakes)

 

* * *

  **Prologue:** Phoenix

 

Castiel couldn't remember ever having experienced such heaviness in his heart. Every step he took hurt him - each congratulation, each thank you felt like just another slap in the face. He smiled through them, as strained as the expression was, until no one remained but Hannah.  
The corridor took a turn, then another, in silence: their steps echoed through the empty cells that Castiel feared would once be full again.  
At the section's door, he turned.  
"I will take care of him," he said, "Return to them."

"Castiel -"

"We've won a victory today, Hannah," Castiel reminded her, "This is not the time. And when you go, keep telling them. Keep telling them, even if no one listens, who the true hero is."

The younger angel nodded, if reluctantly.  
"I will meet you in the Second Heaven by the promised hour. We have much to do, Castiel."

As if bringing a martyr to rest wasn't of much importance.  
The section door was heavy and its sound echoed of pain and isolation when it hit its frames. The smell of ozone lingered heavy with the suffocating dust of broken walls that had yet to settle, and the corridor was still as littered as before from the collapsed sections. Castiel stepped over the worst of it and listened to the rest crumble under his feet, slower and longer the closer he got. He'd had no heart to properly lay his eyes upon the sight and he wasn't certain if he had it in him now to do it.

The body lay still just as it had fallen; half upon the seat, half down from it, and dust covered it from head to toe. The fingers of the hand that hung down bent against the floor and parts of the collapsed wall pressed against the back of the palm, so close it had been up to chance they hadn't crushed the whole arm. Getting up to the body was difficult enough: carrying it out would be a task.

The air was filled with the finer dust that still floated as thick as ever, and Castiel felt it attaching onto him as he crossed the large pieces of shattered stone. The closer he got, the worse he hurt, and his malfunctioning grace gnawed at his insides like it was sensing the prime opportunity to cause as much damage as it could. He knelt amongst the rubble and brushed through the vessel's hair with his hand, scattering a layer of white from it.  
There were no words; nothing had required this sacrifice. Nothing had required it to be carried to fulfillment, nothing but the pain that had driven the act, and the grief Castiel felt wasn't easened by the knowledge of it. His arms trembled as he reached to pick up the arm and the leg that hung from the seat's edge, and he felt weaker than he would have liked as he turned the body around. Dust had formed black clumps with the blood that had burnt to the edges of the wounds. He felt sick to see it. He felt responsible, too, and too affected to carry on. With a degree of defeat he picked up the body and brought it upon himself as he settled to rest on the seat; his arms wrapped around the chest, palm over the wound that marked the point of entry for what Castiel assumed was a sharp shard of stone that Gadreel had used to carve and trigger the sigil.  
He leaned back and closed his eyes and hoped the cell would collapse on them both to spare him from the loss. This wasn't a victory. He'd lost everything. How selfish was it to think that? How selfish was it to think it with the body of the very angel who'd sacrificed himself to earn them that victory? Was he saying his sacrifice was worthless? That wasn't what he meant. What he meant was that the price had been too high, and it had been paid too late, and that it had been bought with blood that was too precious for the occasion.

"You should have stayed."  
The cell didn't echo anymore. It was too full of stone.  
"You deserved much better than this."

For a passing moment, he could have sworn his grace felt a spark in the body; a response. His head nudged, neck barely bending under the weight of disbelief and grief combined, and he realised he couldn't see clearly in the light the window was casting in front of him. He didn't move - nothing but the dust did, and he could feel the blood sticking to the skin of his hand that still rested over the wounds.  
Then, after what seemed like an eternity, he felt that spark again.

 


	2. The End of the Endless

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Casual warning for descriptions of blood, injury and internal bleeding.

* * *

 

_'I need you to take care of him. It's chaos up there, Sam. I can't trust anyone. Not yet. Not with him. But I trust you. I know I can trust you.'_

The voices could have been coming from a well hidden deep within a narrow cave. They were insensible and echoed so badly that hearing them made Gadreel feel more ill by the minute; he wanted to shut them out, he wanted them gone entirely, but he couldn't turn back to the darkness again.

_'What do you want me to do? If a Rit Zien can't help him, how the hell could I?'_

_'Sam. Please. All I ask for is that you try. I didn't ask for Rit Zien. I used who I had, who I knew wouldn't harm him. Our powers are not enough to heal him. But maybe time can. What he needs is a safe place.'_

_'Cas - he's...'_

_'I_ am _aware. But I refuse to run a blade through him. We have to try. We_ have _to.'_

There were bumps in the aether. Rhythmic, steady bumps that shook his whole existence like he was made of burning water and contained solely by a thin membrane that stretched when its contents moved. Every movement, every moment hurt; it was worse than the dungeon, worse by far than anything Thaddeus had inflicted upon him. (Who? Who had Thaddeus even been? He'd never thought of asking. Thaddeus had never thought of telling. Thousands of years together, and _I am not your friend_ was what it all came down to. A blade in him, a blade in them both. And neither had ever thought of anything beyond what they shared in pain.)  
The torment came from the inside, and at the very core of him was a hole that widened beyond control, and out came the million needles undoing him thread by thread.

_'What do I do?'_

_'I don't know. You stay with him. Stop drinking, and stay with him. Dean's in the wind, there's nothing you can do for him now. Gadreel's grace has sustained... unprecedented damage, and it's impossible to say how that affects him. Rule of the thumb is that a grace that hasn't burnt will heal, so we have to trust that he can recover. There's... nothing to say that he can't.'_

_'Just like there's nothing to say that he can, Cas. This is insane. You know how much pain he has to be in!'_

_'I know. Sam, I know. He's been in pain before.'_

A pleasant, welcome silence followed. Through it, something shifted; the world did, and then a soft layer of something took Gadreel in, straightening the painful bend of his body and finally, with that one last gentle stretch, he became a solid being once more. A cover was brought over him.

_'So I do whatever I can, as a human, to - a human? An angel?'_

_'Considering the damage done, it's best to think of his state as... mainly human. He has no shield against anything, and his grace won't be able to energize the body.'_

He'd been injured in the fall. He remembered that. The burn, the crash, the agony of it. Memory failed him in what had happened since, but the voices speaking made him feel at ease, at home, and not afraid. Wherever he was, whatever was to come next, at least he was safe with them.

 _Brother_ , he called to the void.  
If he had a younger brother, then the voice speaking last belonged to the one.  
 _Don't go._

 

* * *

 

Sam watched Castiel's back disappear through the bedroom door and he was left there, confused and not entirely sober, with the fading smell of electricity and a whole emptiness of the bunker to accompany the blank space in his head. Then he budged, made a quick round to his bedroom, to Dean's bedroom - and he made no note of anything in it, the pain was too much to bear - to pick up the whiskey, and then to the bathroom for the rest of it. He came back to the unmarked bedroom and unloaded what he'd carried upon the bed on the side that wasn't occupied by Gadreel; he barely dared to glance, afraid to find him dead already, as there was very little question of just how close the other was to being so. But Castiel was right about one thing, even if prolonging another's suffering for nothing was something Sam didn't want to partake in. Castiel was correct that he needed something to cling to, a purpose beyond the drink and wanting to strangle someone not present in the room, something urgent to cut him from the vicious circle.  
And this was important.

He laid everything out in an orderly fashion - he'd done this a thousand times before, there was nothing new to him about the fish hooks and the string and the bleached rags and the smell of alcohol mixing with burnt flesh and the copper of blood. With the hands of a field medic and not the hands of a stranger on equal footing he separated and undid the open layers of clothing from around the angel's torso and discarded them on a chair away from the bed to keep his workspace clear. With the area exposed he made an estimation of damage he stood a chance to fix in comparison to what he couldn't. The conclusion confirmed that whatever he _could_ do was as ridiculously ineffective as wiping clean the shattered glass still clinging to the frames of the window of a house that had collapsed in fire. Willfully he ignored that fact, wet the rag with whiskey and cleaned first the cuts that made out the sigil, then the small stabwound in the middle of it, paying attention to the roughly torn edges and to making sure the strange stone-like shards caught in the flesh were all removed as he continued. He couldn't do anything about the sternum - he wasn't a surgeon, this wasn't a hospital, and he'd never had to fix something that was shattered to pieces and scattered inside someone's chest. When he sutured the wound closed, he felt like a child playing with the body of some poor bastard he'd found dying in the forest, too naive to realise the person was really dying, and that he was doing nothing but making it worse for him.

He cleansed the area again, made sure the wound stayed closed, and then wrapped a thin layer of bandage around the angel's chest to keep it covered. Having noted the heat of the other's skin, he took the vessel's temperature and found it alarmingly high; three minutes later he'd gathered up the other rags that hadn't sat in the bag that Dean, another dead man walking, had taken and disappeared with, and he spent the next hour entirely concentrated upon dipping them into iced water, placing them upon wherever he believed they could most efficiently bring down the fever, and then replacing the warmed up ones as necessary.

By the third hour, he walked out to grab a glass of milk only to find it had soured, and that the rest of the kitchen was as empty as the halls that led up to it. The emptiness echoed, and the stove looked dirtier than he was used to: he only realised his hands were stained with blood, tinted to a bright shade of red like a butcherer's after a hurried handwash, when he turned to rubbing the surfaces clean. This was Dean's space, Dean's area of responsibility. He came here to rub and clean like an angry housewife whenever he was upset, and now he was gone, and Sam had left in his wake multiple stains of alcohol from spiking his coffee up with a little something. Drinking didn't make him feel better, and he didn't know if it made Dean feel better, but he had nothing. He'd ran away once and it had given him some peace, but there was nothing to run from now. There wasn't a true void, a true loss. There was a murder, a kidnapping and a theft, and he wasn't the sole avenger left in the world.  
But being tied by these facts was worse yet than running had ever been, to these halls and to these walls and to these memories of wasted opportunity, lies and deceit, of hurt and healing and of fifty other kinds of poisons. Of Charlie, of Kevin, of Dean, of everyone who had been here and went away.

For the first time in days, Sam's legs gave in underneath him and he fell on the floor, elbow scraping the stove, turning it on, and as he sobbed and laughed turning it off, he realised he'd never felt more alone.  
"You knocked the stove on," he told himself, "that's fucking funny."

 

* * *

 

He'd taken an hour, and despite the burning guilt that followed him into the room, he could have as well taken two or three and nothing much would have changed. New ice sat in the kitchen's freezer waiting to turn solid; the old cubes swam weakened and shrunken in the bucket of water that had lost most of its contents. The bed was wet, and with a heavy sigh Sam got back up to fetch some towels that he propped underneath the angel's body - it would only get worse because there was no way he could stop trying to cool the other down, and water was about as good as it got.

He'd never asked Dean how high his fever had been when he'd collapsed from the trials. Now that he sat there, trying not to wet himself on the sheets and trying not to trickle too much ice water on whatever part of him didn't inevitably get wet regardless of his best efforts, he wished he'd been strong and stable enough to fill a tub with ice just like Dean had done for him. It would have amounted to nothing much, because just like his fever, this fever wasn't from a flu or a pox, but at least he wouldn't have had to deal with knowing he was trying to soothe it down with means that were vastly ineffective. Throwing someone in a tub of ice is the last resort - Gadreel was beyond last resorts, and the fever was hardly the worst part of it.

With trembling, numb hands, Sam replaced the rag upon his forehead and raised his eyes to the ceiling, lips parting, forming unknown syllables and letting a sigh through. His posture fell apart and he stretched his shoulders, feeling his spine pop twice.

"Come on, now. Give me a sign of life. Anything."

In school - Sam had been seven or eight at the time - they'd found a bird with his classmates. They'd thought it was sick but with retrospect, Sam was almost certain it had just flown into the window and cracked its skull or injured its spine, something it had never stood a chance of recovering from. They'd wrapped it up in a napkin and brought it under the gazebo on the table, trickled water through its beak and held hands against it to bring warmth to its body.  
Within the hour it had been dead, and they'd been sad and they'd all thought about that bird for a while, talked about it daily for a week, and then everyone had forgotten. Sam hadn't forgotten, it seemed, because here he sat with that bird again, the room as dark as his memory of that gazebo was, trying to take away the heat they'd blown into its feathers and battling the inevitable because someone else was too wrapped up in his tragedy to do the right thing.  
He was trembling when he stood up, wiped his wet hands to his jeans and exited the room again.

The echoes wouldn't die down, the thick air and the smell of ozone that was thicker still and had spread from the room to the whole floor both seemed like they would surely drown him. The doors were all closed save for the ones he'd used and now apparently didn't bother closing anymore, and not a breeze was there to move them or greet him on his way back to his own bedroom. It was that door that he shut after himself, leaning heavy against the firm wood and taking a deep breath to clear his mind. Doing this would be betraying Castiel, but he didn't have a choice. He wasn't going to prolong this any more than he'd already done. He didn't have the heart to, couldn't stop the raw pain it caused him to know how much he was making the angel suffer for nothing. He couldn't do it for Castiel. He'd held one man dying in his arms and he couldn't take this one too. It would end, and Castiel would have to understand or he'd have to beat him for it, it didn't matter.

When Sam's hand wrapped around the solid handle of the angel blade he kept near his bed, not close enough for it to truly be a defensive measure but close enough for him to feel secure with it there, he wondered who he was doing this for. He was, first and foremost, doing it to regain the quiet: that unbroken silence where death wasn't lurking behind the corner but rather had already passed through. He was doing it for his own peace of mind. So was that wrong, was that - selfish? He'd never been one for this decision. When, and by what right, could he decide someone's life had come to an end? At what point was he granted the rights of God, the ability to end what still remained? But Gadreel would need a miracle - and there are no miracles.  
The grip of his fingers around the weapon tightened, turning more certain, more firm and confident. It was such a relief, the very thought of it. And then he'd be free to cry.

 

* * *

 

A certain kind of softness lingered in the midst of the cocoon of sharp barbs and black fire. It formed the walls of the space, a gentle prison in its own way, holding Gadreel still and restricting his breathing like it was keeping him from hurting himself with the gasps that he always felt he needed to take but couldn't bring himself into drawing. His fingertips mapped the coarse something underneath him that wasn't the stone of his prison: something strictly familiar yet unfamiliar at once, something he felt safe against but at the same time misplaced like he'd changed fundamentally since he'd last touched it - since he'd last lain upon it.  
He could hear the vessel's lungs wheezing, a quiet small whining sound of air catching onto something that was obscuring his breath every time he breathed in or breathed out, and his whole existence was just that, in and out, wrapped in a trap that seemed to be made of the universe itself. It was so protective somehow - and it was oddly sticky, like cloth wet with water, but he couldn't understand how that could be, so he discarded the thought as wild imagination.

A part of him kept thinking; _someone will save you. Someone will come._ And it was always with equal confusion that he realised that no one would come. He had no firm grasp of where he was, if he was alive or dead, and barely anywhere to start fixing the broken picture from to regain the memory of what had even happened, but the one thing he knew was that no one would come. No one had come for centuries, for many thousand years. Why would anyone come now and furthermore, how could they possibly take away the pain he felt? How could they easen something that was his sole existence, the only thing that he'd become?

He'd thought these things before. His head had rubbed against the prison's wall, feeling the hard cold of it upon his bare wings and shoulders and the curve of his back and he'd long since stopped struggling to get back on his feet. And then Abner had come. He'd been as blind as he was now, but he'd heard him through that dark, and he'd reached out, and for moments, he'd been better. The relief was small but it wasn't insignificant: it had changed his whole life, turned it upside down, turned it from _him_ to _them_ and to the battle of desperation with hope like the wheel of daylight and darkness turning round and round, seemingly endlessly, although - he'd learned - everything had an end, even the things that appeared forever.  
The only constant was that a bottom this deep and dark could only be filled with a ray of light, and it would eventually come, somehow, and bring him over to the other side.  
Where the other side was, he had no idea.

There was a hand on him, then two; they undid layers from him, careful and almost affectionate, revealing a throbbing core that was exposed and vulnerable. Fingertips gathered speckles of dirt from him, something that was not supposed to be there, and cool water washed a dulled, swollen pain from his surface like it was a layer of filth gathering upon him.  
His brows creased and a small gasp passed his lips, and it was like that small sound scared the hands from him as they stilled and waited.

"Gadreel?" an even, kind, _concerned_ voice called out for him.

Instinctively, he wished to shake his head in denial. Physically, he did nothing at all but breathed, and the moment slipped from him, turned to more considerate touches, a circling motion and a heavy sigh from the outside world.  
There was a soul with him here - a powerful soul, one he knew very well but couldn't place in time. It wasn't an angelic grace, it didn't have the sound or the size, so it had to be human. It was male in essence, tinted by compassion and modesty - such a perfect contrast to his greed and pride - and it was concentrated on him like escaping from something much worse than Gadreel's toxic aura could ever amount to be.

He could have sworn the fingers ran through his hair once, gentle in almost a familial way, as if to drive away a weariness from the one caressing and not the one caressed, and when the experience was over, it left a warmth in the midst of the war that was waged within the skin that still concealed Gadreel within.

 

* * *

 

Night slipped through Sam's fingers. He made strong black coffee to stay awake, as not a single part of him was ready to fall asleep. He drank it by the bed's side, one hand on the blade and the other holding the cup, trying to come to a final conclusion on where to move, what to do; at times it seemed that the angel was stirring, but then he fell into the usual state of unconsciousness that lasted and lasted until the memory of him ever having been different was distant and unreal again. Finally, as if the blade had grown heavier during the hours Sam had held it in his hand, he laid it down on the bed upon the place where another pillow could have rested, if the beds had had more than one by default. Letting go of it felt relieving and he felt that relief charge into his head and wash him clean of so much heaviness he'd worn inside him that it nearly seemed physical.  
This was as he'd been: torn from the inside out, broken beyond repair. This was the state in which Gadreel had breathed life into him, and now the least he could do was to return the favour as well as a human being could. And just like him, Sam knew Gadreel had made this choice himself, but it only seemed fitting - he'd been denied his death. Now Gadreel, as far as Sam was concerned, would have his denied in turn.

At dawn he changed the bandages for the second time and cleaned the wounds. The one in the middle didn't seem to be healing but the sigil's edges now seemed faded, and while Sam wouldn't have bet upon it, he was relatively certain it wasn't all because of the cleaning. The cuts had turned pinkish and ceased bleeding, and when he patted them down with the towel he'd used for the purpose before, deep crimson no longer charged into the cuts as it had before. The area that the weapon had pierced still remained as untouched by this recovery as it had been, the sutures sinking into swollen irritated skin, but progress was progress and Sam took it in as such. His best, it seemed, did amount to something after all. This, unlike everything else in his life, was under control and had a direction to head for: this, unlike everything else, was something where he mattered.

 

* * *

 

It was Sam Winchester. The colour, the tone, the warmth of the aura could not be mistaken for anyone else's. It was Sam Winchester who sat by him, ceaselessly tending to his broken vessel like it was his sole purpose in life, the sole reason to keep breathing, and when there was nothing to do he sat still and breathed in unison with the angel.  
Gadreel couldn't make sense of it. He had questions that neither his mind nor the world was prepared to answer for him. He'd died in that cell. He'd carved that sigil into his flesh and he'd felt it tear him apart. He'd lived long enough to know when that life ended, and it had been over for him: finally, _finally_ over for him. Nothing had mattered - for that short, bittersweet eternity, he'd been completely free of his burdens and his pain, and he'd paid, he'd known he'd paid, for all he'd done. No more breath to carry on the guilt, no more beating of a heart to remind him of the rhythms ceased by his hands, no more flow of life to stretch on the hatred for himself. He'd been something worthwhile in that endless nothingness, but indeed, the endless had an end. It _always_ had an end.

How ironic that it was his death that was temporary, not his suffering.

With less difficulty than he'd initially expected, he opened his eyes. There was an artificial light source in the room somewhere, dim and kind to the eye, and it illuminated the clean white of the ceiling and the shape of the walls attaching to it. This was not the prison cell - this was no prison cell at all. Sam's presence in one wouldn't have made much sense but he'd still feared, of course; he always feared that the next time he'd open his eyes, he'd be there again, as trapped and helpless and hopeless as he'd been for such a long time. But this was another kind of a room entirely, with an unlocked door to an unlocked corridor, protected and hidden by spells that did not keep whatever resided within a prisoner but a welcome guest, and which yet held at bay everything that could wish harm upon him. Here was safety, home - but not his, and the glassed out look in Sam's eyes told stories about other tragedies that he hadn't been initiated in, not yet.  
For when would life ever greet him with kindness and victory?

"Is he gone?" he asked, voice a broken husk, a crumbling stone wall.  
Sam jumped, turned to him and stared, completely and entirely unaware of what had been spoken from the shock of it having happened at all.  
"Is Metatron defeated?" Gadreel pressed, impatient and rough and unkind.

The man in front of him pulled back, straightened up and tensed. His eyes read invisible lines from his memory and then he blinked, waking up from that slowly lifting slumber of the mind, and he nodded.  
"Yeah - yeah. Heaven's reclaimed," Sam told him, "It's not under Metatron's control anymore. He's locked up. Cas made sure he'll stay that way."  
  
A tension that Gadreel had never known had resided in his body broke apart with a long, heavy sigh of relief. That relief was cut short by a completely selfish experience: a wave of extreme pain, a burn, flooded in him and held his breath imprisoned within him, crashing like a storm at the ocean against the walls of flesh inside him. He could feel himself falling pale and his eyes turn, lids closing tight and mouth opening to a silent moan of agony that never escaped through the tight hold over his throat that was choking him as the fire in him was burning him through.  
His vessel shook and he felt something in his eyes, his nose, ears; a raspy inhale cut into him like a blade but with it, the pain toned down and he could open his eyes again. And he did - wide, unseeing, tracking the ceiling like it could offer some explanation.  
Sam was calling his name, hand over his stomach and fingernails scraping against the texture of the bandages on him. Slowly, he turned his gaze to him and frowned, then turned his head to the side and felt that something in his nose flood out like he was a cup filled with water.

The human was quick enough to react, but pressing a cloth against his nose was hardly doing much about the fact the warm flood was equally present in the angel's mouth, and the moment he forgot to keep his lips sealed, blood burst out like he'd been drowning in it. It trickled down his cheek and between his head and the sheet and he was ashamed of it, ashamed of the weakness, and most of all ashamed of being alive to begin with, for if he hadn't been, then he wouldn't have been weak.

" _Gadreel_ ," Sam's voice spoke out clear and stern, "Can you hear me? Talk to me. Christ."

"I - hear you."

"Thank God. Thank - thank God."  
Everything remained a blur when the younger pushed his hand under Gadreel's head and brought it back onto the pillow. He wiped the smeared blood off his cheek and he was at least half as pale as the angel knew himself appear.

He was - such a kind person. Such a compassionate, forgiving individual; here he sat, genuinely afraid of letting Gadreel slip from him, doing his best to do what no man could - doing his best to patch up an _angel_ , an angel who should have been guarding _him_ and keeping _him_ safe. Their eyes caught up with one another's and the look they shared had a weight tied to it that made it impossible to look away, a draw that held them together.  
There was no question in Gadreel's mind about it, but how to break the news to Sam? There was no recovering for something that didn't even attempt to patch itself. His grace was an uncontained flame within him, so broken that it had nothing to begin healing from. All strength he'd gained was only used to destroying the vessel he was tied to, and the weaker the vessel became, the less strength the grace had to hang onto. This could only end up one way. But how to tell that to the man who, for whichever obscure reason that Gadreel couldn't begin to understand, so devotedly worked to keep him alive?

Sam was bending out of view, and he came back with a glass of water.  
"Drink."

Gadreel closed his eyes and drank. It was so much easier than explaining seemed - so much less exhausting than facing the truth and forcing it upon someone else. The cold smoothness of the water embraced the sore burns inside his throat and for a moment, it settled the scorching feeling inside his stomach as well.

"Thank you," he hoped he was saying, but unconsciousness had its grip on him and it was pulling him away, making the situation distant and surreal and finally taking him in full.

 

* * *

 

The sight of Castiel in the library was one of the most welcome Sam could have wished for. His steps hastened despite the weight that had built into them, and he was glad he'd taught the older to hug when they both wrapped arms around one another and held tight, perhaps too long, perhaps much too long, but there was no releasing when they both missed a third who wasn't there in the line for the next embrace. Finally it had to break, however, and an expecting silence followed suit.

"Well?" they finally asked at the same time, and then fell silent once more, waiting for the other to begin.

Castiel gave in first: he spread his arms in defeat and sighed, aimed a disappointed look at Sam and shook his head.  
"I have nothing," he admitted, and Sam felt his heart sink through the floor.  
  
Suddenly robbed of all strength that had kept him standing he fell to a chair, limbs spread and body sliding slowly further down. He drew circles upon the table's surface to hold back the tears, and Castiel let him be, as he knew exactly how he felt; Dean meant a world to him, too. But he had other brothers - Sam only had the one.  
That thought reminded the younger to clear up his throat and swallow the pain and the anger at the world to speak up again.  
"He woke up earlier," he gave his information in turn, "and the cuts are healing. But that's the good news."

"That is more than I ever dared to hope for," the angel replied with a relieved smile.

Sam hated to be the one to bring him down from it.  
"Yeah. That's the thing, it's - it's not - he's not healing, per se."

The older frowned and stepped forwards, finally sitting in the chair next to Sam. He pulled it sideways so that they were facing one another in their seats, Sam's long legs taking up all space between them.  
"What do you mean?" Castiel asked him, once more as concerned and pained as before.

"He was awake for - maybe seven minutes at most. Spoke a bit, too. But then something happened, and I'm not sure what it was, but he... started bleeding, a lot. I noticed the nosebleed and tried to clean that up but there was a lot in his mouth and - some in his eyes, ears, everywhere from what I could tell. Like the spell melted him from the inside out or something."

"Did it stop?"

"It was just that - that flood of it, like something burst. I gave him some water and he passed out again. He hasn't woken up since but I don't - it's hard to say if he's getting _worse_ . It's rather just that nothing's changing."  
Thinking about it made Sam feel even worse than he'd felt with the news of no news at all. He was tired and miserable and failing the only task he'd been given; what had seemed inachievable by a mere human less than a day ago now seemed to have become the measure of his worth as an individual. If Gadreel would die, then what would there be left for Sam but the knowledge that he couldn't protect anyone at all? That everyone who had ever sacrificed for him would inevitably die in his arms and only because he was too weak to help them, or even make it easier for them; that that was the extent of him, the ultimate worth of Sam Winchester. That he was nothing if not undeserving.

"I need to see him," Castiel brought him back to the present moment with a strict request.

Sam nodded. His body seemed to weight a ton as he pulled it up from the chair and his legs barely bent to take him across the room. Castiel followed as heavy but more hurried; he caught up with the man and they crossed the hall and the corridor with no further words exchanged between them.


	3. A Good Man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Casual warning for continued body horror.

* * *

 

 

The room, unlike Sam had subconsciously expected, still didn't smell of death or even illness. There was no heavy, sweet stench in the air to greet them with its terror by the door, just the dusty scent of a room that had recently been used but in which air had still moved freely for the most part. Castiel's steps were hesitant as he walked to the bed and stopped beside it, like he was afraid to know what he would know when he'd look for it, but he seemed so relieved and so moved to just see the other angel in the first place that when Sam followed him in the room, he felt for the first time that he'd gotten something right. This could have been the moment Castiel came to take the other's body away, knowing  _Sam_ was the one responsible. He'd cast a look towards him and nothing more, just that one long look to tell him he'd betrayed more than just the older's trust, and Sam would perhaps never have seen him again if not for Dean - no matter what, for Dean Castiel would still return. They only had each other for this.

But he hadn't done it. What he saw now was just thankfulness for his efforts and concern and worry for the sake of the fallen brother. That was good to Sam, and he walked to Castiel in turn, standing as the angel sat and staying in wait while the older's hand travelled along the unconscious sentry's body in silence.  
In minutes rather than moments Castiel straightened up again - he did so slowly and stiffly and then stayed still, thinking in quiet, and Sam felt himself growing increasingly anxious for the words that would follow.

"You were right," Castiel said then, "He isn't healing. On one hand he is, but on the other... This damage - it's all new. It wasn't there when I brought him to you yesterday. He's suffered burns on the inside, the vessel is barely alive. And his grace isn't much better than that. The only thing it's holding onto is the body, and the body..."

"It's human."

"It's human, and it won't last long."

Sam sat down. He had to. He climbed on the bed and crossed his legs, fingertips pushing into his hair and rubbing at the numb scalp underneath. His forehead felt tight and there was an ache behind his eyes that made thinking difficult, and all he wanted to do was sleep but he couldn't, if not for anything else then out of fear of dreams.

"Can we take it out? The grace," he asked.

"Too risky," Castiel replied with a sigh that told Sam he'd already thought of this option, perhaps more than twice, "As ironic as it seems, at this stage the body is as dependent upon the grace as the grace is on the body. It's all tied up. He would die to the shock and if not, then he would die when the body could no longer draw energy from him."

"Is there anything else?"  
Sam could hear the hint of panic in his own voice, but there had to be something. Castiel wouldn't have sounded so calm and collected if there were no options. He would have grieved already: he would have at least reacted.

Slowly, the angel nodded.  
"I think so," he spoke, "A slower version of something I once did to regain power myself. But it requires... so much from you, and I can't ask anything of you. Neither can he."

"Tell me. Just tell me, Cas."

Castiel's eyes visited Sam's and he measured the determination in them; then he turned to look at the sentry again and his mouth thinned.  
"An angel can tap into a human soul for energy. It's extremely dangerous and requires perfect precision and stability from the angel, and it can still blow up. Literally. I think we both agree that Gadreel is not up to the task."

Sam glanced at Gadreel and felt the corners of his mouth twitch.  
"No," he agreed, "he's definitely not the guy you're looking for. So what do we do?"

"There might be a way - a spell to bind you externally instead, to provide a link between your soul and him so that he can heal," Castiel continued thoughtfully, "But I have to look into it - see if it can be done and if it can be done with him in the first place. I think it could work. There is already a connection between you from the time he possessed you. It  _should_ work."  
They examined one another for a brief moment before Sam nodded. External binding sounded less invasive than he'd expected - and it sounded a whole lot less unpleasant than what Bobby had been through with Castiel. But more than anything, Sam found himself disinterested in the details. He'd already made up his mind.

"How long?"

"A few hours at most," Castiel promised him, "You should try to wake him up for it."

A grimace flashed on and passed from Sam's face.  
"In a few hours I might _just_ make it," he said.

 

* * *

 

The heat had grown harder since the last time Gadreel had acknowledged it. He could feel the body bleed from the inside, a drop of blood here and another there, and in the haze of semi-consciousness he strained to heal the damage, and was taken under by such an intense wave of pain that for a moment he believed himself dead as a result of it. He gasped for air, the sound of it raspier than before and the following exhale copper-scented; his body convulsed weakly to try and rid itself of what was hurting it, but he could go nowhere, and without him the body would have just been that, a body. It no longer had a soul tied to it, and that was his fault. He'd broken the contract - he'd...

"Hey," Sam's voice called to him, "Not much longer, okay?"

No, it wouldn't be. Gadreel's eyes felt stiff and swollen when he opened them, barely enough to peer through, and he felt an uncommanded release of energy flash faint blue through them. The burn came just the same: the glow was what was killing him.  
"What do you mean?" he asked, each word taking a small forever to push through.  
Sam examined him, brows creased and leaning over him with his wrist pressing to his side. In a moment's time he turned away and brought a cold wet cloth over Gadreel's eyes, and the angel felt strangely certain it was just to hide him looking back.

"Cas said he's gonna figure something out. Something that'll help you."

But what would help him? He didn't want to be helped any more than his grace wanted to heal itself. It wasn't the essence in him him that was sick, it was the whole, the entity itself; the canvas wasn't broken, the scenery on it was, the  _idea_ , the whole. And he wanted to die.

"Why do you care so much?" he asked, broken voice full of genuine wonder.

He felt the bed shift as Sam shrugged.  
"Honestly? I don't know."  
The younger thought for a moment and then continued.  
"I have - like twenty reasons. But I don't need a single one of them. It's enough that Castiel trusted me with your life when he couldn't trust anyone else, and I'm not breaking that trust."

So Castiel was the reason. A hint of a smile passed Gadreel's dry lips; he should have known. Castiel had tried to stop him: he hadn't said much, but his tone had been pleading the moment he'd known. And in that moment - in that moment each word he'd spoken had been poison, only further driving in how far Gadreel had fallen from the cause, how utterly and completely self-centered he'd become, how despicably narcissistic and self-important, prideful and blinded he was. There was no excuse.  
The sentry wished he could have turned around and closed the conversation from his mind and vicinity, but the only thing he could do was lie down and listen to another tempt the beast inside him. He'd put an end to it, once and for all, and still it stirred like a leviathan.

"Do you want to hear the rest?" Sam asked, his voice casual but Gadreel expected he'd sensed the growing bitterness in him somehow and decided to intervene.  
"I'll tell you, even if you don't want to - I don't know how long exactly you need to stay awake, but Cas is not here yet, so I'll do my best."

"Sam..."  
He had to shift. His hand was tied to earth, not the bed, by diamond chains and they resisted when he pulled his arm up and reached for the cloth on him. He pushed it aside and looked at Sam, looked at the pale complexion that covered him, the dark shadows of his eyes and the puffiness alcohol and lack of rest had already given him.  
"I appreciate... what you do for me. But there is... no hope for me; I am broken. You can see it."

Determination took over the exhausted expression on the younger's features.  
"Alone, maybe there wouldn't be," the man argued, his usual fighting spirit rising like a phoenix from the ashes of weariness, "But you're not alone."

"I have to live it, Sam."  
The pain, the prolonged suffering, the fear of tomorrow; the terror of knowing he'd made that one choice right, that one final choice, and now faced the unthinkable possibility of ruining it like he'd ruined everything before it.  
He closed his eyes in shame. He didn't want to die because his life had come to fulfillment - he wanted to die because he was too afraid to live. It didn't get more simple than that, no more clear; he'd died a hero's death, but he'd never ceased being a scared little child lost without a clue, abandoned by the one who'd claimed to love him beyond all measure when he'd taken a step and fallen on his knees as a result.

The younger watched him in silence, saw him turn his gaze away in tears and watched his cheeks fluster not with fever but with shame from the display and more. He didn't allow Gadreel the privacy before the tears were impossible to miss, at which point he seemed to realise he'd been staring and turned away. The older blinked, trying to even out the layer before it broke past the lashes keeping it contained, and though his breath was hitching it was no longer raspy as it had been. For a moment neither of them said anything, because there was an undeniable truth to what Gadreel had said that Sam couldn't counter with logic and reason. It wasn't his pain to bear, and he knew it well enough. He also had no difficulty imagining himself in the angel's stead, as the one bound to a melting body unable to move, unable to end the agony. He'd been there - Gadreel had seen it in his mind when he'd dreamed of the serpent they both had done much to forget.

"I'm sorry," the man finally spoke, but his voice wasn't defeated, only compassionate, "I really am."

Gadreel nodded. Of course the younger would not break his word, and of course he couldn't make the choice to end the pain for him. That was against who he was, even now, even with Gadreel, he would never be able to finish the task, not without breaking, and he wouldn't find the reason to push himself to that point. Instead, he brought his hand over the older's chest - above the point of aching pain, above the soreness of flesh, and gently still like he was fragile and valuable - and stayed still, eyes elsewhere but presence strongly upon the point of contact.

"If you don't want to listen to me," he said then, "If there's nothing I can do to make it easier for you, just say it, and I'll shut up. But I won't let you die, Gadreel. That's out of the question. I've had enough of death. I've had enough of watching people die around me. I've had enough, and you're not an exception. Do you hear me? I'm not playing into your self-sacrificing bullshit. I've had enough."

His hand gained weight and his eyes returned to press the point. Gadreel nodded again, as stiffly as it was.  
"I understand."

 

* * *

 

Castiel's expression was reserved and tense when he met Sam at the door. Sam, holding a fresh cup of coffee and a half-eaten oatmeal cookie, raised brows at him before stepping aside to let him in - the alarm system had picked up something and placed them under lockdown so that the door wouldn't open from the outside, and he'd had to make the trip from the bedroom back to the main door to allow the angel in. He made sure to close the triple lock and reset the alarm even though it pained him to do that: every time a lockdown happened now there was a chance it was Dean and not a false alarm. But it wasn't Dean, and he knew it. Dean could trigger a lockdown but he wouldn't be stupid enough to try coming home again. There wasn't a corner in this place that wasn't protected from  _him_ and that didn't try to ensure that if he'd come in, he'd never walk out again.

"Is it doable?" he asked when they were half-across the library and Castiel had already passed fifteen tests against him, unknowing they had ever existed in the first place, including a dimly-glowing line of Enochian spellwork and a devil's trap so big it spanned the whole room through, carved into the very floor and covered with a layer of glass that looked identical to the stonework of the unprotected tiling.

The angel nodded, but the awkwardness about him hadn't passed.  
"I think so," he said, "and if it doesn't work, there is a chance I can help. But it's - well, it's complicated."

"Complicated as in the spell is complicated, or -"

"How it works is complicated. It requires an existing, um, link, if you may. And I don't mean the kind you have - I don't mean the fact that you've been his vessel. I mean... you have to touch him. And you have to keep that physical contact to him, or the link breaks. It can be re-established and the spell won't vanish if you break the connection, but nothing will happen unless you're skin to skin. I'm sorry, I - I know how this sounds."

Although a bit of the cookie had just gotten stuck half-way down Sam's throat and he had to down it with a much too large and much too hot gulp from his coffee, he continued beside Castiel as they entered the stairway.  
"Okay, so," he replied, bracing himself to the task that he had waiting for him just beyond a few more corners and a corridor, "He gets plugged in to the power source, and?"

"And then, hopefully, he'll heal. He won't take more than you can give and the amount you can give isn't a conscious choice, it's entirely dependent on your soul, which is a good thing because controlling that kind of a flow can be... tricky. I suppose you already knew that based on what I told you. The downside, of course, is that it'll take much longer than directly tapping into your soul for energy."

"So what you're saying," Sam summed up, stopping before the closed door and hesitant to go for it before the conversation was over, "is basically that I have to stay with him 24 hours a day for the next - for how long?"

Castiel shrugged.  
"I don't know, Sam. As I said, his damage is unprecedented. There's no telling how long it'll take. I'd say days. It could be weeks before he can fully sustain himself. I'm sorry. You - you don't have to do this, Sam, I won't ask this of you."

The taller nodded, eyes passing Castiel and taking to the frame of the door. He breathed and prepared and then, with an air of relief rather than anything pushed down the handle and opened the door. Castiel, throwing a surprised look at him before he'd turned, followed him into the room. Gadreel had propped himself into a one-third of a sitting position: his head rested uneasy upon the pillow set against the bed's head and he watched them come in seeming awake but less than aware. His eyes, misty as they were, followed them across the room with little sign of recognition, but the sigh he let out when Castiel settled on the bed next to him was that of relief and contentness, almost happy in its undertone, and he reached his hand across the space between them. Castiel grabbed it and covered it with his other hand, a wavering smile on him as he held it.  
"It is good to see you awake, brother," he said gently, eyes never breaking contact with the older.

"It is good to see you live," Gadreel replied, and Sam noticed the front he was putting up for Castiel: his voice barely trembled and the pitch was lively, as if he wanted Castiel to think everything was alright.  
And perhaps that was exactly what he wanted. He knew of Castiel's condition - it was likely that he didn't want to burden him any more than Dean had wanted to burden Sam with his troubles, the toll the Blade was taking on him, or anything before then. When they sat there hand in hand Sam realised that a lot had changed between them even since he'd last seen them together, and more still from the time they'd not known each other the way they did now, for what he saw there was a genuine familial bond, a kind of love and affection he was more than well initiated about. At some turn, they'd become brothers, and even though there was a divide between them still from experience alone, both of them had naturally slipped into the roles offered to them, supporting, trusting and caring for one another on a level that was deeper than mere alliance. It was clear to the man standing aside for the time being that this bond strengthened them both, and, at the same time, he realised it was something he'd never really expected to see with Castiel. Castiel had always been alone in his family, the odd one that stood out, and whenever he had more contact with the rest, it was always because the lost sheep were in need of a shepherd. Castiel was no shepherd, and Sam had never thought to think of how relieved he had to be upon interacting with someone of his own kind who neither wanted him dead nor expected him to have the answers to everything.  
How naturally, how easily he slid into the role of just a brother when offered the chance, and how relieved Gadreel seemed to be to be able to offer him that safe place to stay. There was an equality to this relationship that he'd noticed earlier, a two-sided faith in and respect for the other's abilities and judgement. It all came so smoothly and had happened so quietly that now that Sam was aware of it, it seemed astonishing that so little time had been required in establishing it, as if the two of them had been pieces just waiting to be connected somehow.

A dizziness took over him and he settled in the chair by the wall, just a couple feet or so from the bedside, and after emptying his cup he laid it upon the table that was by then overflowing with first-aid supplies and containers of water for this and that which had to be kept separated, and next to it on the floor sat the bucket still, although the water had already turned lukewarm and lost its use. Castiel threw a quick look at him, an unspoken question in the weight of it and he nodded. The plan was to try, whatever it would require of him.

"I live," the seraph said with a hint of a smile in his voice, "but I would like to see you do the same. Which is why I'm here."

"You cannot heal me," Gadreel noted, "No angel can."

Castiel nodded.  
"Which is why I will not be the one trying," he replied, "Sam will."

Gadreel turned to look at the human settled in the shadow behind them, the expression on him baffled and concerned.  
"What do you propose?" he asked, eyes back upon Castiel and filled with worry.

"You healed me," Sam interfered, feeling this was approximately the place in the conversation where it concerned him too much to stay out of it, "When I was dying, you saved my life by lending your grace to me. What Castiel is proposing is that we renew the connection, that we - plug your grace to my soul and that I return the favour."

The angel's lips parted as he processed the information, and while he was mulling it over, Castiel turned an approving look towards Sam that Sam accepted with a minimalistic nod. Once more he stood up, if only to cross the distance between them, and sat on the bed instead, breathing out slowly and nervous for some reason he couldn't pinpoint as if the conversation was now approaching a point of no return. In a way it was, but he'd never considered it going any other way. Now he realised he was more afraid of Gadreel refusing to follow the plan: unlike when the situation had been reversed, there was no way for Sam to force him into submission. There was no way for him to save Gadreel's life  _unless_ Gadreel gave him the permission to do so - and based on everything he knew, they stood no chance at turning his head on the matter. Yet, still, he thought he saw hesitation in the angel's eyes, a shadow of the spark in him that still wanted to exist, to feel, to experience, even to suffer if it meant that there remained hope for him in the horizon, and trusted there to be an end to the pain before it would all be over. The battle inside the sentry grew more and more visible and Sam found his own expression turning from determined to pleading, realising he was showing much more than he'd intended - the hurt and the fear that was inside him somewhere, the whole extent of how much he hoped for the angel to make the one decision that would allow him to help at least him. And then, finally, Gadreel nodded. It was a gesture of a spirit defeated but a nod regardless, and as Castiel sighed in relief, Sam found himself with a scared smile.

"What do we do? I cannot possess you. Not like this," Gadreel carried on the conversation, his voice breaking but a new sort of determination glowing from him.  
He'd decided to live, so he would fight now.

"You won't have to," Sam assured him, looking to Castiel to get the details.  
The angel nodded and lifted the hand he was still holding in his own, eyes moving from Sam to Gadreel and back again.

"I will perform a binding spell," he explained to them both, "that will allow you to use what strength is in Sam for your own. It will be exhausting, but it won't harm him, and the connection can be severed at any time so that Sam can rest. The spell will remain until removed, so that even if the connection between you is lost, it can be renewed by re-establishing the provided link. Which, in this case, will have to be physical touch, as I simply see no way for us to safely tie your grace into anything. Not in that condition."

Gadreel nodded slowly.  
"So he will have to stay with me," he noted, looking at Sam directly as if asking if he was prepared and willing to do so.

"I'm okay with that. It's not like I've been spending a lot of time elsewhere for a while now anyway," the human grimaced with half a shrug.

The older's expression turned disbelieving and, undeniably, touched.  
"You would do that? For me?" he asked like he couldn't believe what he was hearing.

"You did it for me."

"For utterly selfish reasons and against your own will," Gadreel reminded, but gained nothing but another shrug from Sam who simply didn't have it in him to feel anything in particular about the subject at hand.  
In his mind, the whole thing had become irrelevant. He'd lived it, survived it and it was past now. The burden attached to it remained - how could it not - but he was too tired, too consumed to think of it now.

"It doesn't matter," he said dully, "The fact remains that I live because of you. And you wanted to help. I get that. I want to help you now, so just let me, alright?"

 

* * *

 

Gadreel had been afraid in his life before. It wasn't the first time and now that he was sealing the fact, it would not be the last time either. But taking this human's hand in his own as the corners of his vision began to dim, as death was already numbing the pain inside him, was one of the most terrifying experiences he'd been through. His whole body was shaking, and it wasn't just the flesh trembling as the foreign energy inside it did away with the crucial nerves and organs and melted open minor veins and major arteries alike here and there like turning the insides of him into a collective of holes instead of a functioning whole. It was the fear he felt, the denial in the face of death that he'd already embraced - twice - and the knowledge of there being no turning back from this point. And when their fingers joined, his barely bending between Sam Winchester's and Sam Winchester's holding his whole hand like he feared it would physically slip from his grasp if he wouldn't, he realised that the worst fear didn't come from the loss of death but rather from the prospect of it, and that it was the fear of dying, fear of this coming too late for him now: that so close to being delivered he'd slip away and it would be over for him.

His vision darkened mid-spell: he didn't hear its end. He tried to hang on but he was so weak and it was so difficult to tell apart where the pain ended and where the rest began that he felt lost in it all. His already frail grip loosened - something grabbed him, pulled him up and he felt blood pouring from his nose again but had no strength in him to care about it beyond acknowledging it was happening. Drawing in breath was too hard, so he ceased, but a firm arm remained around him and he felt his head rest upon something - someone - and a third hand in the tangle of two, a third from which a surge of power entered into him and Sam Winchester both, sealing something that he hadn't been able to reach up to.  
A quiet, an emptiness followed that sealing. It ended with an inhale and a flood like light flooding into his veins, clinging to the oxygen that poured into the blood, and as it spread into him as fast as his heart was beating, it sealed up the holes in his veins to allow the healing to begin. His grace lashed out angrily at the energy but it seemed to avoid the destructive force entirely, and in a moment, the worst was over. Vision returned to him slowly and he realised his eyes had never fully closed to begin with, and Castiel still had his hand pressing together Gadreel's own with Sam's. It was Sam's body that he was leaning onto, and it was Sam's shirt he was bleeding over, but the trickle of blood seemed to have settled once more and only drops were following what seemed to have been like a small stream. His lips felt sticky as the fluid settled upon them and the experience was nauseating, so he closed his eyes and, satisfied that he'd done his part, allowed his consciousness to fade again.

 

* * *

 

"That was... too close," Castiel said, reaching for a cloth from the table and wiping the few drops of blood from upon his knuckles before using the rest to clean the older's face.

Sam's eyes were closed and he was breathing in and out: a cement-like cast seemed to have wrapped itself around his chest and his world was swaying uncomfortably, but most of all he was adjusting to the feeling of the grace sucking out strength from him, as it was a feeling like nothing he'd ever experienced before. It felt like the hundredfold spiritual equivalent of a vacuum cleaner sucking at his chest, at the very core of him, mercilessly and ceaselessly and demandingly like a leech or a tick buried deep into his flesh. And at the same time he could feel what he knew now was Gadreel, that aura which had surrounded him for the long months he'd made a slow recovery from the injuries inflicted upon him by the trials he'd undertaken. Its strength was familiar, as was the restlessness of it, the constant desire for something, combining with an uncanny gentleness that seemed to target Sam specifically and yet impersonally, protectively rather than connectively. He'd never realised how much he'd longed for that presence before now that its return seemed to soothe him so drastically, and it felt like a cape over him that kept him safe from some unknown danger he hadn't realised he'd feared.

"Are you alright?" Castiel called for him, his voice concerned and doubtful.

Sam nodded, finally opening his eyes again. The swaying was settling.  
"I'm good, yeah," he reassured the other, "It's just - a little overwhelming."

"You can come out of it at any time," Castiel reminded him, still hesitant as if hating to put him through a single moment more of it.

Sam shook his head and chuckled.  
"No, no, it's good, I'll be fine. Besides, if I let go now, he'll die for sure."

The older's eyes visited the unconscious angel and the dilemma he faced in his priorities was clearly visible upon him. Then he nodded.  
"You are a good man, Sam. You give so much for so little for yourself. I wish I could help. I wish - I..."

"Cas," Sam huffed, cutting him off, "Just take care of yourself."  
He watched with a small, concerned smile as Castiel's eyes sought his out in a lost manner, and then as the other nodded slowly, realising he was no closer to saving himself than he'd been before he'd sealed the spell link between Sam and Gadreel. His battle wasn't over - it had barely began.

"I have to... I have to go," he uttered, and Sam nodded, relieved.

"It's okay, Cas. I don't mean this personally, but I - I think I'd rather be alone now."

The angel nodded, seeming entirely uninsulted over the potential implications.  
"I understand," he said, now looking at Gadreel again, "You do need your rest."

Sam nodded.  
"Yeah. Thanks, Cas. For everything."

"Isn't it odd that you're the one thanking me, when I am not the one bound and lending my vitae to your brother?" Castiel replied with a crooked smile.

Sam shrugged.  
"I don't know," he said genuinely, "Maybe you'll be, one day. I mean, you dragged his ass out of hell. You dragged _my_ ass out of hell. I'm just returning the favour."

The crookedness fell apart and was replaced by a wider, more certain smile, and Castiel nodded.  
"As I said," he said as he stood up again, preparing to leave, "You are a good man."

 


	4. The Pathway

* * *

 

Sometimes, during moments of dissociatiated realism, Sam thought of his life and realised how odd it was. He'd always lived with one foot in the common world, the normal world, and the other in the _real_ world that was as many shades of shadows as it was of light. In the midst of that, he'd somehow retained his faith in the forces of good - perhaps out of wishful thinking alone, but he'd trusted there to be a god somewhere out there, a god with a host of angels created to protect the world, to protect mankind, to protect _him_. Turned out he'd been right all along, but that the forces of good were as uncaring as those of the darkness, and few of them ever bothered to take the side of the ones caught inbetween. Even fewer cared enough to take a stance for them when action was required to defend them. The pursuit of selfish ends didn't seem to be limited to humanity alone. Angels, in all their holiness and justness, were ones that most often fell in the ranks of those that were blind to all but themselves.  
And here he was now, hand tightly wrapped with that of an angel, years after he'd first learned they existed and years after they'd made clear he was nothing but filth to them. Here he was with the ancient sentry of Eden itself, the forsaken guardian responsible for mankind's corruption - for Lucifer, for the apocalypse, for darkness on earth and for hell itself. Or was he? Sam didn't know. He'd never heard the whole story. And yet he'd believed it. Here, now, he didn't know what to think, and his questions seemed to begin and end with things much bigger than Gadreel.

In a manner, it was a blessing to be so trapped as he was here, his strength stolen away by a pact forged between himself and this celestial. The few days before had been chaotic, a ceaseless struggle against uselessness, against inactivity, and still he found no rest where he now lay but at least there was a knowledge of not being allowed action. His choice to get up and scouring the endless flood of irrelevant information would literally be the death of another, so he had to stay - he had a reason to, a reason more pressing than for following his desire to leave. For Gadreel, everything depended upon Sam's choice to do nothing: his choice to let his brother go to save another's. Yet the longer he stayed there, motionless and as unable to fall asleep as ever from the fear his grip would loosen around the angel's, the more clear it became for him that he wasn't doing this for Castiel, not really. It wasn't Castiel he thought of when his fingers undid around Gadreel's and his heart skipped a beat as he joined them firmly again. It was Gadreel, just Gadreel, and only after that came the notion of Castiel, of himself.

_Why do you care so much,_   Gadreel had asked him. And still, Sam didn't know. How was his whole reason to exist now as tied together with the sentry's life as his hand was to his? How had it come to this in the first place - at which point had it turned from a responsibility, a duty, to the thing he did to keep breathing himself?  
He wished he'd had a belt or a rope to really tie them together with so that he could have slept in the hopes of waking to a clearer morning, or evening, or whichever time of day it would be when he'd wake up - underground the passing of time was harder to keep track of. But even if he'd had one, he'd still feared it would come undone, and in that fear he would have kept waking up constantly and repeatedly until the time he would have given up. That way not having one didn't truly matter, and during the times that his mind was shutting itself down, he did regardless wake up to the fear of losing grip.  
He could have taken time that way. Five minutes struggling to stay awake, a minute falling asleep, a quick jerk back to wakefulness when his fingers slid yet again from the pits he'd so firmly attached them to beforehand, thinking he'd made sure they wouldn't come undone this time.

The worst came a few hours into his lonely fight against his body's need for rest, when he heard, not too far from him, his phone vibrate to announce an incoming message. He was so close to it - so damn close to knowing, and the hope in him was crushing him so that the pain was almost physical. He fought it by telling himself that Dean would probably not message him now, wherever he was; that whoever he'd become would most likely be so consumed by the delusions he'd chosen to believe, that Sam at his worst had chosen to confirm, that he'd think Sam didn't want to know what became of him now. Of course, none of that was true. Whatever he'd become, whoever and wherever he would be, Sam would never cease caring, worrying, and hoping the best for him. Any other day Sam would have stated that there was nothing that would stop him from fighting for Dean, but upon this one, the unlikely had come to pass - there was something more pressing than Dean.  
His eyes turned to Gadreel and the sickly pale tint of his skin, the thin layer of sweat that covered him and reflected the dim light from across the room, and reminded himself that the message would stay in his phone. The thirty seconds it would take him to reach it and come back were not worth the effort.  
He closed his eyes and hoped to forget, but sleep was now driven from him like prey before an exposed predator, scattered in the winds outside of the firm walls that separated him from his family and the rest of the world just alike.

 

* * *

 

The flow of energy was the first thing Gadreel knew when awareness trickled into him again. He followed it not to wakefulness but to the source, a weak flicker of grace winding around the soul it had done its best to avoid during their last contact, and he felt it react in turn, expecting it to reject him but rather finding it holding onto him tighter, pulsing with the life that it offered him and that he barely dared to take. In the physical realm he felt Sam's grip of his hand tighten and heard him shift, perhaps turn. It was impossible for him to tell the hour like his connection to the universe had been severed entirely, but when he felt how tired the human next to him was, he knew it had to be night again, and Sam had not slept yet.

With some effort he opened his eyes, and this time not to the golden colour of the ceiling but to the warm grey of Sam Winchester's shirt, to the odd shape of their hands entwined and the white of the sheet that had loosened from the edges and now lay between them like a salt field shaped by the retreating waves of a long-dead ocean.  
His vessel was sore from the fever but no longer burning, neither literally nor figuratively, as it had been before. The bleeding had almost ceased, leaving behind scarring surfaces where a physician would expect to find no such thing, and his grace had finally retreated into a contained pearl-like form instead of a spread-out broken haze that destroyed everything it touched. His knees touched the side of Sam's thigh in the middle of the bed, and where he lay on his side the younger was spread on his back, and as Gadreel watched him and made sense of the scenery, Sam turned to look at him, swollen weary eyes sparkling with surprise at finding him awake.  
The hunter turned, leaning onto the elbow of the hand that was holding Gadreel's, and his long hair stuck to the side of his nose; he didn't brush it back, as if he just didn't care anymore. Then his mouth opened but he found no words, and an awkward silence followed, one during which his eyes visited the uniform sight of the ceiling to gather up _something_ he could say, as he'd already chosen to say it. Finally, a yawn broke through that determination and he fell back on his back with a sigh.

"How are you feeling?" he asked from the ceiling rather than Gadreel, and perhaps that was easier for him.

The older thought for a moment, thought of all the things he wanted to say but just like Sam didn't seem to have the way to bring them out. Then he settled with the easiest.  
"Better," he answered truthfully, "Much better."

Sam nodded with a small sound; he seemed satisfied with the conclusion, but hesitant, as if he had something he wanted to add but couldn't find the words to express. The angel held back his curiosity - the physical contact between them would have allowed him to see everything if he'd so wished, but he'd learned his lesson about stolen information, so he waited instead. Sam would speak what he found important to say. The rest didn't matter.

"Do you think I could, you know, stretch my legs a bit?" the younger finally asked him, turning to look this time.

His brighter shade of golden green examined the Gadreel that he could see, and the angel answered that look unmoving, seeing everything he needed to without ever taking his eyes away from those of Sam's. The stillness in his gaze could have been interpreted as threatening, but the link between them allowed no such misunderstanding. Just as Gadreel felt Sam preparing for words, the man would feel his emotions and intentions much before they ever came clear in anything he did, and by the time he'd choose to act in the physical world, Sam would already expect it happening.  
He nodded, and by the time he did, Sam had already felt his agreement.

"I will not break," he replied with a hint of a smile, "if you take some time for yourself."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

It would take some time for the other to trust his gut instinct, the feelings that he received through the connection, but eventually a confirmation like this wouldn't be necessary for him. A yes would be yes if it felt like it was, and Gadreel knew lying would be completely redundant when the truth could literally be received from him at the slightest unspoken request.  
But perhaps the other wasn't yet _aware_ of the secondary functions of the link between them. Perhaps he didn't know that it wasn't a one-way track at all - that for giving what Gadreel needed, he could take anything in return, and he wouldn't need to ask first. That it wasn't a leash on him but a pathway between them, one that would allow him as far into the angel as he'd desire to reach. It wasn't much of a price to pay for the life he was giving, but that he didn't know was still a minor relief to the older. He'd never been this open with anyone, never allowed such immense vulnerability in himself. No angel did so lightly - him least of all.

Uncertainty was the main tone in the manner in which Sam let go of him. The breaking of the link was immensely painful for Gadreel, and his eyes closed against his will at the separation. He tensed and breathed a wavering little gasp, feeling the other's fingertips returning upon his arm and flashing the link back to life immediately, although only partially with so little contact between them.  
Ashamed, the older pushed himself to ignoring the emptiness and the ache that had resulted from the other's essence abandoning him, and he looked directly into Sam's eyes as he spoke, reaching again with his grace to the point of contact so the younger would _feel_ him speak the truth.  
"Go," he said, "I will be fine."

"You don't - it didn't look like that," Sam noted doubtfully, but his expression was conflicted.

"I have enough strength to be on my own for some time. It will not undo the healing."

"How long?"  
The man had such keen senses to know there was a time limit at all. Gadreel hated knowing there was: hated forcing him to stay in the first place.

"An hour."  
And he'd lied. For the first time, he'd lied, and Sam knew it, of course.

"I'll be back in twenty," the man spoke and his voice told Gadreel exactly how aware he'd been of the falsehood in the older's modesty.  
The angel closed his eyes again and sighed in defeat.

"You are a good man, Sam Winchester," he said quietly as the other took his fingers from his skin again.

It felt like a part of him being torn away: a quick snap leaving open shallow wounds, like scissors cutting skin. When he opened his eyes, Sam was still there, standing in front of the bed and watching him with careful concern and hesitating to move. They watched one another and Gadreel attempted a smile, anything to convince Sam he wouldn't cease to exist if the other thought of himself for those promised twenty minutes, and Sam responded to it with one that was but a flash across his lips. Then, finally, he went, and the sound of the door closing echoed like the gate of the cell that Gadreel tried to forget. The silence that followed was even more familiar, and as it stretched he could almost believe this was but an illusion - a hallucination in the pale light cast from the window of the cell at morning's break. His body shook and he could feel it falling apart again, the strength in him like a candle's flame drowning in molten wax now that all of it had nowhere to drain, now that the way in was as closed as the way out.  
He breathed in but felt like his lungs weren't strong enough to separate the oxygen, like a weight was crushing him, and he gasped and found his body turning, spreading upon the bed to get more space in his chest for the muscles to function. His own weight came upon him as he relaxed, the ceiling above him still as golden as it had been before, and he blinked tears from his eyes and tried to chain himself to the moment, to the real world, with mediocre success.  
His fingertips combed the sheet underneath him, and while swallowing was hard at least it no longer hurt, and the saliva passing through tasted of nothing in particular, no longer coppery and raw with blood.

This wasn't by far the first time he watched a ceiling like that from a bed exactly like this one. For most of his experience, boxes had littered the room like it was a storage, but here was nothing, nothing but the furniture that had been there the whole time, and the room in which he'd rested before was now tastefully decorated with some signs of life scattered around the neat picture. He'd been there when Sam had finally decided to settle in, and he'd felt the discomfort in him and hoped now that it had passed, that the younger could find himself adjusting to the thought of having something akin to home. Gadreel knew how important it was to someone who'd been denied the luxury, and it wasn't because he'd stayed in Sam at all. If he'd ever had a place to call home since that cursed day upon which he'd decided to trust his own instincts for the first time, it was here, in these halls where he'd once been greeted as half an ally and trusted to fight for the family that resided within. It was here that he'd hoped he could fit in with that flock, but fear had driven him out, and not only that of his own but the mistrust he'd sown as a result of that. And he'd broken more than he'd ever fixed, thinking there would never be a way back. Yet here he was. Most of the family wasn't. There were broken pieces and him, a stranger, in the midst, now yet again trying to find a place to stay, a place he'd belong.

Gadreel closed his eyes once more as heaviness pulled the lids down. More than anything he wished that this time he could stay, and that this time it would not be his own misjudgement that drove him away. He'd had more than enough chances to prove himself better than the lies told of him, but more than that, better than the lies he'd told of himself, and he'd failed them all. Much good had that done him: he'd watched the walls collapse around him, both figuratively and literally, as the price he'd paid for the choices he'd made. But had he learned anything?

He couldn't trust that. He hadn't learned before, and one would think that the thousands of years of torture would have been enough to drive the lesson in.

 

* * *

 

Sam entered the room as quietly as he could without sneaking, a bottle of water under his arm and a half-eaten pack of salted crackers in the other, the best the house had to offer without a grocery run that he wasn't going to make. It had been less than fifteen minutes since he'd first stepped out, but nothing outside was making him less restless and anxious, so after emptying his bladder and spending four minutes by the kitchen sink in varying states of extreme discomfort he'd simply given up and taken with him what he could. The last thing he carried was the final book of Game of Thrones - the only one he still hadn't read in full, partially because the thought of waiting for more was vastly unappealing to him. Returning to that world both scared him and offered him some comfort: it hadn't been long enough since the morning that they'd debated the story with Dean, having one of the last few normal interactions before... before Dean had chosen to chase Metatron alone, and the rest was history. But Dean had already changed before then, and perhaps it hadn't been all Dean that Sam had had that conversation with. Regardless, Westeros seemed more appealing to him than Lebanon, Kansas, and with that in mind he'd brought the book along.

He made some space upon the bedside table and laid the necessities there - the next time he'd go out, he'd take the first-aid supplies with him. It might be a few until then, however; when he glanced over towards Gadreel, he wasn't surprised to find him sleeping or unconscious, if there even was a difference between the two. The paleness of his skin had only turned worse since Sam had last seen him mere sixteen minutes ago and the sickly dark rings around his eyes seemed further highlighted by the fact. As the younger stood there he noticed a single drop of blood nesting at the base of the angel's nostril, and a heavy sigh left his lips. That sound seemed to stir the older - his eyes opened slowly to the sight of Sam next to the bed and he took that sight in with gradual awareness.  
Then, finally, he had a smile for the younger; a weak, barely visible smile but a smile nonetheless, and in the half-waking state Sam knew he could trust it to be genuine. The younger tried to return it but didn't know if he'd managed; instead of making sure the message was delivered, he turned and walked to the table light across the room, turning it off to give his own eyes some rest. From the corridor through the open door enough light passed into the room for him to see clearly still, the only difference was that not every corner was illuminated, and it served to make Sam's state of physical exhaustion that much less difficult to live with as he retraced the few steps he'd taken back to the bed.

There was a tension between him and Gadreel, an electric feeling that turned the air harder to breathe and the weight of it around Sam like a blanket laid over him. It made speaking hard and thinking even harder though thoughts were surely racing inside him, only that he could catch none of them or make much sense of what they concerned in the first place. It made his fingertips cold and his toes colder and brought an extra beat per second to his pulse that he didn't need, and a dizziness to make it all that much worse, and he had to look away before he laid his knee on the bed and heaved the rest of his body upon the unfamiliar mattress. He expected to be much more well-acquainted with the bed by the end of the week, and even more so if someone didn't make that grocery run for him, because he'd surely starve to death on crackers alone.  
For some reason the thought was distantly amusing to him as he reached his hand towards the angel's, ears full of white noise and heart beating to a point where it would have to stop entirely. When their fingers joined, there was a moment of silence, of nothingness, and in that moment Sam was afraid the spell had broken after all. Then, certainly and inevitably, came the feeling of something falling in place, and there it was again, the strange sensation of energy leaving his body at the speed and force of a bullet train; a small gasp parted from him and he closed his eyes for the briefest while, trying to hold his balance as he lay down again. His fingers were as cold as Gadreel's, but when he next took a glance, the older didn't seem as weakened anymore. He seemed less tense and more present, and the look in his eyes had gained a sharper tone to it as he looked at Sam and Sam stared right back at him. The dim lighting did its part, of course - it was harder to make apart the creases of his skin and the wetness upon his forehead when the light no longer reflected from those details.

Darkness made it easier to be brave; to be reckless, uncaring, irresponsible. Sam made sure his hands never once lifted both at once as he struggled to get rid of his shirt, and he reached for the blanket set by the bed's end with just one hand as the other was holding onto the angel's with two fingers and nothing more. There were unspoken things here, societal norms that he was breaking and implications that followed from those, but he'd been awake for so many hours he'd lost the count of them and none of that mattered now. The blanket was heavier than he'd thought - it fell on his abdomen and on the angel's face and prompted a small huff from the older, and Sam heard himself chuckle at the sound, something he hadn't expected to do, not today, not anytime soon. The edge of it ended up around Gadreel, the other fisted in Sam's hand, and the shade it provided almost made it dark enough to not see anything so that when the younger brought his whole arm around the other's body - to keep him close, to keep the link between them alive no matter what - he could have been anyone, and at the same time, there was no mistaking.  
There was a second layer to the draw of energy that was a constant between them, a wholeness of the link which Sam was barely aware of, that somehow made Gadreel a part of him, something he felt in him as a living creature bound to him so tightly that it was as if they existed as one. Although he feared to try, he was almost convinced that if he'd allowed it to happen - if he'd wanted it to - he could have heard what the older was thinking, perhaps more than that. He felt everything Gadreel felt, the weakness and the relief the link provided him with, the small vibrations like emotions on a different plane than where Sam felt them, all of it. He felt every breath the other drew in and suspected Gadreel felt the same of him, but at the same time he knew the sentry wasn't looking, wasn't reaching into him like he was now doing, poking around things that were none of his concern. And he knew that Gadreel had allowed him to do so; somehow he knew that no matter how far he'd look, he wouldn't be denied entry. That power made him uneasy: he'd much rather just asked.

And with that, he felt the connection wither, and for a moment he thought it was for some reason beyond his control. But no, it wasn't; he could still reach through if he wanted. _He_ had closed it. _He_ had chosen not to look, to not feel what he'd felt.  
With his eyes closed and the connection between him and the guardian just what it was, he felt safe and confident that no matter where this was taking him, it wasn't any worse than where he'd been before. If the only thing he was good for today was to be an angel's recharger, then he was happy it was for Gadreel. He'd avoided the thought for long enough but there was no denying it: they were similar, too similar to ignore, and in healing Gadreel, he was healing himself as well. He didn't know how, couldn't trace the root of that experience, but it was there and he trusted it. This was the right thing to do.

 

* * *

 

Dust flowed in the corridor. It sparkled in the dim blue light cast through the windows as they moved further down, down, down towards the darker parts, the places where the windows were nothing but an insult, a constant reminder of the losses suffered. Towards the darkest pit - the place of no return.  
The steps, the descent of a thousand stairs, echoed narrower and narrower until walking them was almost impossible, and there... there it was, the opening, the archway to the hall of darkness. Night lasted so much longer here than anywhere else, daylight peaking only ever when it was called: when someone else required it. 

But they weren't alone. The very word itself implied as much. Gadreel was used to coming here alone, accompanied by nothing but the senseless fear the place introduced in him and the struggle he put up with the chain that pulled him onwards without mercy. Now something was holding onto him, holding him _out_ of the cell rather than dragging him forwards: a firm grip attached to him by more than mere touch, a steel link between his grace and the calm energy that radiated from the being that had followed him here, and they stopped - for the first time, they stopped. He didn't have to go in. He didn't have to stand and watch the gate close on him, and the wounds upon him no longer flared at the memory of torture, of endless solitude, of mockery and shame and guilt and helplessness.

"Is this where they held you?" Sam asked, and Gadreel could feel his surprise at the presence of his own voice in this realm that wasn't in his dreams but in the mind of another's. 

"This is where they held me. I sat in this cell for thousands of years. It was in this cell that I..."  
Died? How could he use the word when he was... when _he was there_ to use it? Was it death if it was taken away?  
But Sam knew, of course. He'd died a thousand times in his own cell, in the one that had to have been as dark and down as deep as this one was. So the man nodded, just nodded, and his grip of Gadreel seemed to grow firmer. 

"It doesn't look as bad as I..."  
The younger's words trailed away, became an echo. 

"It did not look like much when I entered it the first time," Gadreel noted heavily, "now the very memory of it is enough to put me back in."

Sam nodded again.   
  
"She dropped the key. That is what it came down to. I was standing in the middle, ready to die, and Hannah - Hannah was trying to unlock the door. The key fell, and I saw it fall even though I was not looking, and I felt relieved." 

"You wouldn't have stopped even if the door had opened, would you." 

"I knew it would not open." 

"But that isn't true, is it? She held the key, and she was going to free you." 

She was there with them, or the golden, faded figure of her was; everything Gadreel could remember of her. The way her wings trembled, the halo on her wavering, the fear, the conflict. The desire to run, not to stay; to save herself, not him.

"That is not what I mean."  
The silence stretched a while longer than Gadreel felt comfortable with, and while it lasted, what was left of Hannah dispersed in a cloud of golden dust right before their eyes.  
"What I mean is that the door never truly opens. That is why I stand here now, even though there is no conceivable way I could be here. I will never walk out of that cell, not for good. And you know how it feels, Sam Winchester - I know that you know." 

"Well, you're wrong. We're both wrong. Because you know what? You're _not_ here. I can guarantee that." 

When Gadreel looked, Sam was standing there - their hands were still locked together, a bond he couldn't undo as if his hand wasn't his own to command. He watched the determination, the desperation in the younger grow and then, finally, Sam turned his eyes to him and stared right into his, the look nothing but a challenge that Gadreel was unwilling to accept.

"Come."  
The human seemed much stronger than he was when he tugged at his hand and brought him towards the stairs again.  
"Neither of us wants to be here, so let's just go."

 

* * *

Sam could navigate the mindspace. Gadreel could not. There wasn't a magical reason to this, no big secret to be uncovered: it was a question of readiness. One of them was out, unchained, the other still as held back by his past as ever. So Sam took them out of that place and walked them up the endless stairway, hand in hand like a couple of children after school, and the whole way up he was creating another place at the end of it, some place that was better than the one they were leaving behind. He sensed the anxiety that grew in the other, for what if there was nothing but the prison where they were headed for now? What if this was truly the reality they resided in, not the one he'd dreamed of so briefly before?  
Determination was a defining characteristic in Sam, had always been. He'd been the stubborn one, the rebellious boy, as long as he remembered, even though Dean had always fit the profile better. What he wanted, he fought for. And it wasn't always a good thing - he'd never been infallible, perfect, or particularly sound in judgement. That was how Lucifer had happened.

The meadow they entered from the doorway of Heaven's best guarded was familiar to Sam alone. He'd never once thought of this place while they'd shared the body, and he could feel Gadreel taking it in as a new sight entirely. It was probably due to the angel's presence that the place felt so much more real than it usually did, just like the prison had felt real to Sam before even though he'd never been there. The scents, even the gentle breeze of wind was there just like it had been when the memory had happened, but Dean wasn't here - Dean wasn't here because Sam didn't let him in. 

"Why did you let him through?" he asked from the midnight sky. 

"I thought I was doing the right thing."

"I let him through because I thought I was preventing him from entering. Well, that was bull. I kickstarted the apocalypse because I thought I was right and my brother was wrong."  
Sam wasn't sure if Gadreel knew this. Regardless, the older stayed still and quiet as he spoke.  
"That _I_ couldn't be wrong."  

"You were proud."

"I was betrayed," Sam continued, "and I was stupid, I was _so stupid_ to trust a _demon_. So what are my sins? Pride, naivity, lust? Greed? I wanted to be something more than I was. I was - I was selfish and proud and I never once stopped to listen, because I didn't like what I was hearing. The last thing I wanted was to be wrong again. The only thing I ever was was wrong."  
  
With a tug of the other's hand, Sam settled to sit on the warm dry grass. The trees were shaking in the wind as Gadreel followed him down - he didn't have much choice in the matter. 

"I was a hero of Heaven. In a way, I was blinded by my pride as well. I was - I became convinced I knew what was best for you, for Eden, because I stood by the gates and I let no one through. Because I stood there and watched, I thought I had your best in mind and heart, that there was none who knew you better than I did. I loved you, but I loved myself more, and I didn't love God enough. Those are grave sins for an angel, but I felt like I was above the rules."

The angel spoke in a heavy, regretful voice, but Sam was happy to hear him say anything at all. He'd expected it to be harder but it seemed that Gadreel had decided to do what he could to make better choices now, and that open honesty was the first stepping stone he'd decided to move to. It had so far landed him at the side of the road with a lengthy gash across his chest, barely left him alive, but he hadn't given up that easily, and for that Sam was thankful.  
These were things he probably had wished to say all along, things that the long millenias of torture hadn't erased from him, the truths he believed in and wished someone, somewhere, would at least hear out one day. This was a true confession, not something glossed over to spare the one confessing from the shame of his own deeds; a confession that perhaps begged for forgiveness, but more than anything simply longed to be heard. 

Gadreel wasn't looking at him, not the way Sam was looking back at the very least. While the younger watched the bitter expression on the features of the vessel that he could see, Gadreel's eyes were upon the stars, mapping them from Ursa Minor to Cassiopeia and beyond, probably seeing more than what Sam could ever hope to see.

"When Lucifer came to me, the time could not have been more on his side. He convinced me that oblivion to what he viewed as the true nature of all things was akin to slavery - that wisdom was freedom, and that God would never grant you the things you needed to become what you were meant to be. And I - I believed him. I truly believed he wished for your best. Never once did he admit how much he despised humanity, how jealous he was. All of that I learned after my imprisonment and his fall. They accused me of sharing his views, and of so many unspeakable things - I would have never done any of that. But I did let him in. I did let him in and I _am_ responsible for the rest. As such, I... accepted what happened to me. For a long time, I... I believed I deserved to be punished. That the torture was just."

The angel's eyes visited Sam's so briefly that it could have been the doing of the younger's imagination, if not for the fact that he turned away so quickly it couldn't possibly have been unprompted. The fingers of his free hand reached for the blades of grass and caressed them, bending them and sliding between them to feel the wax-like surface press against his skin, and Sam just watched and waited, curious to see what else was still waiting to surface with the pressure of silence and expectation alone.  
Finally the other straightened up again and cast his vision towards the edge of the forest, and when Sam followed, his heart could have as well stopped or turned to ice or just simply shattered. Dean stood there - not today's Dean but the young, lanky, tall Dean from his past. He was just standing there because Sam wasn't there by his side, but he seemed content waiting, like seeing Sam on the opposite side of the field was enough for him as long as the younger was safe.  
Hastily, Sam gripped Gadreel's hand tighter and pulled him up. 

"We have to go."

He felt the angel looking back as they turned. The field led to a road and Sam followed that road onwards so determinedly it took him a while to realise his hand had slipped from the angel's, and that the sentry had stayed behind. He spun around at the notion, finding Gadreel following him but slowly; he didn't seem affected by their parting, only hesitant to walk away. 

"What happened to Dean?" he asked Sam when they were back within a hearing distance. 

Sam held out his hand and shook his head, turning to hide the tears that entered his eyes in fear that they'd fall out.  
"Dean's gone." 

The feel of their hands joining again was enough to push him over the edge, and as they continued walking along the road to nowhere in particular, Sam felt the drops fall upon his cheeks in a realm that only sleep separated him from.


	5. Breathing Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “But they were not friends. They were here to keep each other from spinning off alone into the dark matter of the universe.”  
>  _\- Carol Anshaw, Carry the One_

* * *

 

The road continued up and into a mist that turned out to be the gateway between the dreaming state and the real world. Gadreel opened his eyes to the dark ceiling: it was tinted a dirty shade of grey by the orange light cast from the corridor. Everywhere around him was something; on his front was Sam Winchester, over him was the man's arm, and against his back was the blanket that he was trapped inside of now like he'd been trapped inside of it before the fever had struck, although the memory was faint to him.  
  
Waking up was always unpleasant and confusing for him. It wasn't natural for an angel to fall unconscious for any number of reasons, and he only did so because something in him had never had the chance to heal from the torture and the fall. Now that he spent more time unaware than lucid, it only served to make the return to the real world more difficult for him. Which of the things he'd experienced were real, and which were changed or created by the stages between full unconsciousness and wakefulness? The less time he spent awake, the more he feared that the next time he'd wake up, he'd be somewhere else again.

For minutes he stayed where he was in the exact pose he was in out of fear of stirring the sleeping man beside him, but there were sources of discomfort here that he couldn't ignore. He wasn't keeping his vessel as unaffected and unchanged as he would have liked: it was still sick and weak as he was, and the wound in the middle of his chest ached deeper than just the flesh. As a soldier - a guardian - he wasn't one to fear pain. After all the years he'd held up against torture that defied all imagination, he knew what true agony was. Yet here, now, this throbbing feeling in his flesh that flashed and echoed in his bones was the least pleasant thing he could have imagined, and the fever that still had its hold on him made his skin sore and muscles even worse. The pose he was in was uncomfortable to say at least, and there was a dryness in his mouth that tasted of old blood and more. This wasn't the kind of discomfort that resulted from injury, this was a generalized feeling of unwellness that could be nothing but mortality itself, the ticking of an unseen, unheard clock that reduced his strength in various different aspects at once that he'd need to tend to or suffer the consequences of leaving them unattended.

Sam Winchester smelled vaguely of old alcohol when Gadreel separated from him, inch by inch moving towards the edge of the bed with a simple prayer in his mind like a broken record; _let me be strong enough to walk. Let me be strong enough to stand. Let me be strong enough. Let me be strong enough, God, that I do not fall on the first step that I will have to take.  
_ His toes felt stiff when they landed upon the floor, and whatever remained behind was even worse than that. His ankles were like they weren't supposed to bend, the joints hurting, burning as he leaned his weight down upon his feet, still afraid to let go of Sam's hand where his fingers joined with the hunter's. He'd have to, and he'd have to do it before he'd be standing or risk falling when the link broke, but the thought of it was enough to make him dizzy and the last thing he wanted was to wake the exhausted man up because _he_ needed something. Like there was anything more in the world that he could have possibly asked for.  
And so, finger by finger, he let go.

The solitude was overwhelming.

The pain that was released with the loss of contact made the earlier aches seem irrelevant and laughable; this wave was enough to force his eyes closed and his mouth into a thin white slit, and breath came heavy through his nostrils that suddenly felt on fire. Fever bit into his body like the anchor of a large ship, bringing his shoulders and head down and casting a film of sweat all over him so suddenly that for a moment he thought he'd been wet with something externally, but of course he hadn't been. His feet shifted haplessly upon the floor, legs trembling under the slightest applied weight.  
Here he was - Gadreel, the forsaken hero of Heaven, the redeemed martyr who'd died to make way for the righteous angel, unable to stand up on his own. Worse yet, he was filthy: there were layers of old sweat on him and a heaviness in his hair that itched upon his scalp, and where his grace no longer burnt away the waste from him, his flesh served in the way it had been meant to do, leaving him with the worst stretched ache where his bladder was and an emptiness where new energy should have gotten processed. A painful emptiness, it was; hunger was something he'd never experienced before, but there was little guessing as to what else this feeling could have been. Either he was still full of holes or he was starving.

He'd never fully realised how heavy his vessel was, or how that weight settled upon each bone, muscle and joint in him. Right now it was hard for him to keep his head up, much less a whole torso, and his knees were much too eager to bend rather than hold him in balance or an upright position to begin with. With a grunt of intense disapproval Gadreel reached for the wall to support himself up - that much he had to be able to achieve. Inch by inch he got higher until he stood in his full height, head swimming and vision misty like it wasn't fully prepared to process light. The first step threatened to throw him over; when he regained balance, he cast a desperate look in Sam's direction, but the man was still sleeping and should stay that way. He'd manage this: where he was going hardly mattered. He needed to get out of this room, and whichever need could be fulfilled first, it would be so.

The door was much further than he'd expected, the corridor miles away. By the time he stood outside in the light of the corridor's still-lit lamps he was breathless and gasping for air, whole body trembling so hard he knew it wouldn't last very long anymore. He'd dragged his bare wings all the way up here, whatever was left of them after the concentrated fire of his grace had done away with a part of Heaven itself, and he already felt them bleeding from the useless efforts he'd made at getting away. His back hit the wall and he slid down along it, the floor greeting him much harder than he'd expected, and he covered his face in his arms and pressed them over his knees and just breathed, trembling and dizzy and nauseous and hurting, just hurting, praying it would stop.  
He'd made it across ten feet and no more than that. That was what he'd been reduced to.

 

* * *

 

"Gadreel. _Gadreel_ \- Christ - are you - are you out of your mind?"  
Sam couldn't feel his feet. He dropped on his knees and grabbed a hold of the angel's wrists, completely ignorant of the fact that the touch rebound them together, and for a passing moment he genuinely believed that the floor had caved in underneath him when the drain started. Then, once he realised what it was, he ignored the feeling and the relief it now gave him, and pushed the sentry's wrists against his shoulders and his shoulders against the wall behind him. Gadreel was looking at him with the gaze of someone who wasn't entirely sure of what he was seeing, but clarity was already returning to him now that Sam was there with him.  
"The hell were you thinking?"

That was genuine, sheer worry. Sam didn't try and pretend anything else. The last thing he needed - the last thing he wanted - was a corpse in the corridor. They'd come this far, and yet the angel appeared still as utterly suicidal and stupid as before. Even after all that Sam had sacrificed to keep him safe, he rather chose to walk out that door and - and what? Die here?

Gadreel's eyes were avoiding him now, and for the first time, anger prompted him to ask the question again, but not vocally.  
And suddenly he felt like he was experiencing it himself: the weakness and the shame for it, the worry for _him_ of all things, the desire to be as functional and as strong as before - the desire, more than anything, to prove that he could at least take care of his own body even if he remained useless in every other aspect.

That was something Sam hadn't prepared for. He hadn't actually wanted a direct answer. He'd just wanted _an answer_ . There was a difference.  
 _Know what you wish for,_ John Winchester's ghost told him, and he shut that man up quicker than he could have shut up himself.

"How - how long did you sit here?" Sam asked, voice as lost as he was suddenly feeling with the complete absence of anger that had just seconds earlier been so alive in him.  
Now he was left with a void flooding with confusion and shame instead, and he realised he'd much preferred to feel frustrated.

"An hour, or perhaps two. No more than two, I guarantee you that."  
There was a hint of frustration in Gadreel's tone, like he'd stolen some of it from Sam, and his eyes were still set upon the corridor that he hadn't been able to conquer.  
"And before you ask, I feel fine."

"Fine for a guy who's unable to stand up, or fine for a guy who's bleeding to death?" Sam asked, barely swallowing the insult that had been very close to following.  
  
A conflicted, embarrassed grunt was all he got for an answer. With a sigh, the younger loosened his grip of the angel's wrists and took a step back before planting his knee upon the corridor's floor and his other hand on top of it.  
"Okay," he said, trying to figure out a way to put into words the plan that would inevitably injure the sentry's pride even more than the situation had already managed to do so far, "Okay. Let's get you to the bathroom first, it's closest. You probably feel like crap."  
He brough his arm under the older's and helped him up - much more of the other's weight ended up resting upon him than he'd expected, but at least Gadreel could stand. The angel reached a hand for the wall and leaned to it, relieving some of the burden upon Sam's side, and he seemed to be regaining balance although he hadn't visibly lost it as far as Sam knew. The link between them seemed to fill with static for a moment and instinctively the younger pushed his shoulder more firmly to support the other's weight, but in the end nothing much happened, and within the minute they'd managed to start taking small steps towards the destination.

"I barely recognise this place," Gadreel noted with a hint of confusion in his voice, "It was within these walls that I recovered, but the building remains an enigma. We are not in the corridor that leads to your room, are we?"

Sam shook his head.  
"It's a big place," he replied, "It was big for the four of us and now that the count's down to two..."  
Instead of giving in to the pain, he chuckled.  
"Of course, I never knew we were four. So it was smaller for my three than it was to - than it was when it was actually three. That doesn't make any sense, does it?"  
But for some reason, even if the words made no sense, he felt that Gadreel knew exactly what he was talking about - that he could feel the meaning like Sam had felt the answers to his demands.  
"Anyway, I'm getting used to it. And this is the larger bathroom. Can you - stand on your own? I need to unlock the door."

With a little patience, the angel settled on his own two feet, now even lacking the support that his hand had previously taken from the wall. He swayed, but he was confident enough to look around when Sam twisted the key in its unwilling, creaky lock. The bathroom smelled vaguely of fruit shampoo, the damned thing Sam had gotten for free from a hairdresser whom they'd saved from a ghost earlier in the year. One of the smaller cases - those were strangely often the ones that paid, even if the payment was just a hair product or a new shirt.  
He leaned towards Gadreel's arm and took his hand back in his, never once breaking skin contact between them, and pulled him in the room where he soon helpfully settled to sit on the toilet seat, looking completely exhausted by the efforts required of him to get that far.  
They watched one another in a moment's silence and Sam realised that as much as he wanted to walk out the door and wait outside, that didn't seem like the wisest decision. The angel had barely managed out of the bedroom before collapsing - what were the odds that after draining away in the corridor for hours he'd now be any more capable of staying stable on his own here?

"I'll fill you a bath," Sam finally sighed, "and if you drown in it, I swear I will find wherever it is that angels go after death, and I _will_ hunt you down."

A smile passed the older's lips before he turned his head down and nodded.  
"I will not drown. I promise."

 

* * *

 

Whenever they separated, Sam couldn't help the emptiness that replaced the flow of energy. He'd not only gotten used to the feeling in the few hours that had passed - perhaps no more than ten in all - and yet leaving the bathroom without that feeling was like his soul no longer only belonged to him at all and that the bunker really was too big for a single man to inhabit, like its corridors stretched and rooms grew into halls, and the halls into vast cathedrals of emptiness. All that space was making him feel more dizzy than his sleep debts and alcohol ever had, and he noticed himself dragging along the walls on his way back to the bedroom.

He grabbed his phone (the message hadn't been from Dean, of course it hadn't, but he still listened to the two new messages with equal anticipation) and wondered if it was safe to order groceries here, or if it would compromise the bunker's security.  
With a sigh he realised he truly had no other choice but to make the trip to the store himself, and the realisation filled him with a new kind of terror, this one more of prolonged loneliness than anything else. With that weighting him down the whole way to the bathroom's door he announced the plan and, after confirming that he would indeed return to a bunker without a dead man's body in it, headed to the garage to pack up the car for the trip. He'd be back in an hour, and for the sake of the world that he still had to live in he hoped that Gadreel knew his own strength better than he'd so far proven.

 

* * *

 

It had all started from water, like it all now started from water. Water had carried the seeds of life like the water of the womb nurtured its own: it had created the vast first playground for what was no longer dead and still. God had laid that spark down in the water and it had multiplied, a chain of creation that no longer needed anyone else to guide it. And God had declared it good and left it in safety, placed Gadreel by the entrance to that haven in the heart of Eden, told him to never let anyone pass through. He'd been so proud: he still remembered what it had felt like to be chosen. He alone had stood apart from the angels, the thousand guardians. He alone had been picked apart by the hand of God Himself, and he alone had carried the responsibility.  
Responsibility indeed. Gadreel had never realised what a burden it had been to bear before it had been too late to take a better hold of it, to carry it with the care it demanded. He'd been so proud and so blind, and his downfall had been the downfall of all life, all creation at once. So much for a single entity to bear. Too much, he would have wanted to argue. He was an angel, not a god. But once, he'd truly believed he was more than just that. He'd believed he was wiser than God Himself. 

Now his hands combed through the soft unmoving water, tied in the flesh that was not his own yet which was void of life beyond that of his, and he wondered if it was by design that the gentle pressure did away with so much of the pain. It easened the draw of earth on him and as he slid further down, his body separated from the bottom entirely, floating in the water like he weighted nothing at all, and the ache that ate him from the inside was nearly gone for the time being.  
He'd promised not to drown, and didn't know if it was possible for him in the first place, but the thought of leaning his head back and breathing in the blood of the universe seemed like a good idea. The pain of it filling his lungs would be just a detail in the mass of information that it would carry to him before the end, if such would be granted to him.  
As his eyes wandered upon the sight of the ceiling he questioned if this experience was unique to him, or if there were others who felt as comforted by the call of death when it was not present to claim them, as if it was the voice of a dear old friend, ready to embrace them anywhere at any time. If this was just him, or if someone, somewhere, right then was wondering the same, imagining the flow of water into their body as if hoping to become one with the stream again. But Gadreel had never been in the water. He'd been created from different matter, and different matter he would turn into again when fate had given him the whole of his punishment.  
Dust to dust. 

Sam Winchester was concerned about him. That much was certain. The reason why mattered both less and more the clearer it became - he didn't seem to grow tired of asking Gadreel whether he would live through this or that if left to his own devices. Perhaps for a good reason.  
Clearly, Gadreel corrected himself, _clearly_ for a good reason. Here he was contemplating breathing water like a fish with no gills.  
At the same time, it seemed strange. Why grow concerned now that he was nearly good enough to breathe on his own in the first place? Did Sam see so directly through him that he could foretell the oddities that entered that vast space that had once been filled with concerns of duty, of redemption? Surely he could have no idea what was going on in there, yet he seemed aware nonetheless. 

The water splashed over the edges as the angel turned and hung his arms out of the tub. His nose pressed against the white porcelain and he breathed droplets of water, eyes following the sluggish stream crossing the floor towards the sewer in the middle of the room. It had changed much from the time it had poured from God's figurative fingertips, and at the same time, it seemed the same. There were more years in those drops than were woven in Gadreel's own design, and he felt young in the midst of the little that was contained with him in the artificial womb. The gentle waves made him softer, turned his skin wrinkly like an old man's, and for the while he was like a human being, and his weakness bothered him less than it had bothered him before.   
And still, still he was too exhausted to even try and reach the towel he'd thought he'd left close enough. When the water would grow cold, he'd let it drain out, and if it would come to that, then he'd rest at the bottom until Sam would come and pick him up again. That seemed to be the way things worked now. 

When he'd gazed into the mirror, he'd seen no halo and no wings. It hadn't hurt him yet but he could feel the shock fading even now. This was him. This flesh, these bones, this skin was him. What he felt beyond those things that could be seen or exposed no longer existed like they had before.  
The pain would come when the ache would die down to make way for it.  
For now, he merely enjoyed the loss of responsibility: his shoulders, for now, were much too narrow to carry a fraction of it. A fallen angel could only do so much for his world.

 

* * *

 

"You alive in there?"  
Sam felt like this had to be the hundreth time he'd asked that same question in different forms, yet the relief he felt at a response was just as great like he'd never heard it before. He pushed the door open and found Gadreel from exactly the same place he'd left him in: from on top of the toilet seat, this time still wet and wrapped in one of the oversized bath towels the bunker was well stacked with.  
"Not bleeding. That's - an improvement." 

The older nodded. His free hand slid relievedly into Sam's grip when the taller offered it to him, and for the moment it took for the link to spark to life they both stayed where they were. Then, once Sam's existence had turned from the great void it had been before back to the feeling of draining, of dripping through the point of contact into the other, he pulled the angel up and turned away to give him the privacy to put on some clothes.

Sometimes their hands separated: they did so by pressing together from elsewhere, palms turning to wrists and wrists to arms and arms to shoulders, Sam standing with his back to Gadreel and Gadreel trying not to lose balance as he struggled to get his long legs through the offered pants that he seemed to experience as much narrower than they appeared to be. He didn't look half as lost in them as Sam had expected. For some reason, he'd never quite realised they were nearly exactly the same size. The male that looked back at him in the clothes that he'd worn a thousand times before himself was different from the one he'd expected to see; without the living link between them, he might have not recognised him as he was supposed to. The face, the eyes, everything about him was the same, but with the white t-shirt and the ragged loose jeans he looked like any man and nothing like the angel that he'd been before taking that bath. His hair still stuck to his forehead as well, changing his appearance at least that much more to the strange direction, and suddenly Sam wondered who, or whose remains, he was looking at and touching.  
It was a strange moment and when it was over, when it all settled back in place, he could have breathed out in relief. With a quick movement he grabbed the towel from the older's hand and instead of hanging it back on the rack he brought it over to dry the other's wet hair until it was no longer hanging low but rather pointed into every direction, seeming that much more like the hair he was used to looking at and not so much like that of the unknown man's. The injured angel squinted at him, the question hanging so thick in the air between them that Sam wouldn't have needed a link to hear it and, as followed, to completely ignore it as he finally placed the towel back on the hook. 

"I need breakfast," he announced, "so I'm gonna walk you back to the bed and you're going to sit down and I'll bring something up with me."  
For both of them, it seemed: Gadreel may not have known how to ask for it, but Sam had felt enough by then to know that he needed it as much as Sam himself needed it. For what reason, the younger really didn't want to know. That was a question for Castiel and he'd rather leave it up to the angels to discuss matters of grace. 

"I do not believe you are half as content to be locked in a single room like this as you show yourself to be," Gadreel said, following him all the same onwards across the corridor, now perhaps even slower than he'd done before, "and to know that it is because of me... I do not deserve the sacrifices you have made for me." 

"Just shut up and keep walking, okay?"  
There was an unmistakable spark of amusement between them, and Sam realised he wasn't sure from whom it had originated from. Perhaps both at once - it certainly felt mutual enough.  
"In case you haven't caught up yet, I don't particularly care what you think you deserve or think you don't deserve. You're here and I promised to take care of you, so I will. Argue with Castiel if you have to."

 

* * *

He was lying, or at least omitting information. It didn't necessarily matter, but the knowledge didn't help the curiosity that had sparked in Gadreel.

They shared a plate of toast with eggs on the bed, one knee bared for each and touching the other's so that they had both hands free for the meal. These kinds of strange solutions appeared to slowly be turning into the norm for them the more movement was required, and enough seemed to be when it wasn't just one of them needing upkeep to stay content. Through the stabilizing connection between them Gadreel had already noticed something new about Sam, particularly the way he was adjusting to the link. The younger seemed to _need_ it much like Gadreel needed it - the amount of pure relief that flashed from his end each and every time the connection was re-established was unmistakable and hard to miss. And when the plate was empty and they settled back on the bed, the sentry tired to death from all the commotion he hadn't been prepared for and Sam still lacking the appropriate amount of rest to function properly, there wasn't half the distance between them that there had been the day before when Sam had made sure to only occupy the side of the bed that was free. Now it wasn't just their fingers that were joined but their whole hands from wrists to palms to fingers, and their arms rested on top of one another's, and none of that seemed to bother the hunter any more than it bothered the angel next to him. While the link surged with life, the thoughts of death remained far enough from Gadreel's mind, and somehow something similar was happening to Sam as well. He was running from something just like Gadreel was, and even though neither said a word about it, the older knew he wasn't the only one aware of it. 

With eyes closed, the strangeness in this new place they had arrived at was easier to bear; it felt more natural than the place they'd left behind, the one with distrust and bad judgement. And yet at the same time, the things that had been between them were still there like a shadow surrounding the light that held them together, and as long as that burden was still there, the rest would never feel effortless or completely genuine. As long as those things remained, they'd still be strangers, enemies in essence not by choice but by a shared past, and no matter how important the uneasy alliance between them had been or would be, it would never be enough to erase the things that had come before.  
They were things that neither wanted to talk of, things that still hurt, wounds that had festered underneath the layers they had been concealed and put aside with. 

"When I can stand on my own," Gadreel heard himself speak through the haze that reigned in his mind, "do you want me to leave this place?"

"I think you can find the door just fine without me showing you to it." 

"You know what I mean."

"You know what I mean, too."

And again he was lying, and just as before, Gadreel said nothing about it.


	6. Court of Men

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “When hatred judges, the verdict is just guilty.”  
>  _\- Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut_

* * *

 

The angel wasn't sure whose nightmare this was. They were both by the library's table, watching Kevin pile books around the tablet, a half-eaten sandwich on a dirty plate next to him. His notes were scattered everywhere, one of them on the floor behind him almost hidden underneath a bookshelf, and he seemed weary and stressed as usual.  
There was more space between them here than in the real world, and it was strange for Gadreel to feel Sam so close to him when there was such a divide between them where his senses were lying, and Sam kept his eyes strictly away from him as if afraid he'd close that distance here to strangle him if he didn't.  
His lips were pale, a thin slit through which no words had fallen. Kevin was oblivious to them as if they weren't truly there - in truth, _he_ wasn't truly there. No one was. In the bunker, two floors underneath them, the library lay darkened and without occupants, and the only things left on the tables, if there was anything at all, had nothing to do with Kevin Tran.

"He was a good kid," Sam finally said with a muffled, strangled voice, "He trusted you. He trusted _me_."

_I didn't know about you - and_ I _still trusted you_ , he added, probably only half-aware that the words carried across the link between them and were voiced to Gadreel like the rest. It had been a subconscious intent at the very least, otherwise it wouldn't have happened, but whether he'd truly wanted for it to come to pass was unknown to the angel.

"There are few things I regret more," Gadreel replied, heavy with guilt. "I panicked. I... I was not - I thought I could trust him."

"You thought you could trust Metatron so you killed a child."

Technically, Kevin Tran was no child. Hadn't been for a while, even if they'd ignore the fact he'd had to grow up earlier to stand up to his task: he'd reached an age of majority sometime before his death and was therefore legally an adult. But technicalities did not matter. For Sam Winchester he'd been a child, because he'd felt responsible for him from a younger age - Sam had promised him safety and provided little in turn. He had never forgiven himself for it, and after standing witness to Gadreel's crime, he would never forgive himself for it in the coming time either. At best the pain of the fact would easen, but here, now, it still stung as piercing as ever.

"You were there," Gadreel reminded him, hoping that he would be brave enough to look back, "You know what I know."

The younger hid his head in his arms, oily hair spreading over them and on the table. Gadreel couldn't look at him and he couldn't look at Kevin, so he turned to look at the doorway instead, the same doorway in which he had stood when he'd made yet another wrong decision.

"I know," Sam said, "and that's the worst part. I know everything. I don't want to know the whole story, Gadreel, I just want to hate you so that I don't have to hate myself. How can I hate you when I know how afraid you were, where my brother was pushing you, where _I_ was pushing you? How can I blame you for grabbing the one last straw when I've done the same myself? But he was my responsibility. And I failed him. It's my fault - I can't reason with this, I can't reason with anything. He was my responsibility."

"You had no control over my actions."

"The hell if I don't know that."  
His head was still hidden in his arms and the sharpness of his voice was muffled by the chamber of flesh he'd created to contain himself with.  
"It doesn't change anything. I wish you'd given me the choice."

_And you would be dead_ , Gadreel thought, forgetting his thoughts were equally audible to Sam as Sam's were to him.

"It was my choice."  
Slowly, the hunter straightened up again, eyes hazy as he got used to the vision they'd surrounded themselves with.  
"If I was dead, Kevin would still be alive. That's all I ever asked for. That no one - that no one else would be hurt because of me ever again."

There wasn't blame in his voice at all. It was just exhausted, and it was exhausted in the one way that Gadreel could feel in his bones like a hollowness, a shadow following him around. He'd felt it in the bath, he'd felt it in his cell, it never left him alone like there was an emptiness inside him calling to be filled with what had been denied from him.  
A silence followed his words. What could Gadreel say to that? What was there for either of them to add? Things had gone the way they had. No one had foreseen it. Him and Dean - they'd thought they were making the right decision. Perhaps not for the right reasons, but they had saved Sam's life, and that hadn't sounded as bad as it now looked. Little had they known where that would take them at the time when they'd both felt so certain.

"If I'd be dead," Sam finally spoke again, "If you just would have let me die - then Dean would live, too."

"You cannot say that for certain."

"There's one thing I know," the younger overrode the words and turned a piercing look towards Gadreel, "and it's that if I was dead, I wouldn't have to sit here and think that I'm responsible for this. It was my time, and you stole it from me. The one thing that should have been mine - you took it from me. There's _always_ a price. You should know that. You paid your half of it, Dean paid his. Kevin paid mine. And I never had a choice."

 

* * *

 

It took a lot of courage for Gadreel to take Sam's hand again. To his surprise, Sam didn't even try to protest; he stood up with the angel and followed him to the stairway, steps heavy and unwilling to leave but wise enough to know that staying would achieve nothing. The last time they looked back, Kevin was on the ground; neither could see his face, but the yellow note was there on him, marking the kill.  
They had turned their backs on him, and that was all it took. That had been all it had taken in the first place: one step to the other direction. Lives were that fragile - the ones abandoned, measured out of the equation as less valuable than the goals of others, had no other endings. 

The stairway turned from grid to ground as they ascended. The doorway grew grass, and Gadreel felt the remains of his grace react to the memory of the familiar essence that he sensed through the door. This was somewhere he'd never thought he'd take another, but Sam had his trust.  
The bunker's heavy gate opened to the Garden of Eden, and the sunlight was bright and warm in the air heavy with the scents of flowers and fruits and berries and grass growing from the fertile earth. A choir of grasshoppers toned the afternoon and the birds in the trees chirped to announce their entrance, charging back and forth across the deep green of the pathway that they now stood upon. 

He didn't have to worry about recognition. It was inbuilt, and he could feel the younger's breath catch as it flooded into him. Sam took a step ahead without him, their hands parting again, and somewhere along the way from the bunker to here he'd lost his shoes entirely to walk Eden's ground as it had been intended for him. Gadreel didn't know flesh in this realm, and he wasn't sure how Sam would perceive him, but he himself felt existence as it was supposed to be: he felt whole and strong and absolute, and he'd raised his faces towards the sun to remember how it had always greeted his flawless grace in turn. His wings were no burnt stumps but stretched wide, each as powerful and full as the Lord had intended, and although he was contained as he'd always been when he'd walked the Garden, he still stood half a man taller than Sam in his full height.  
His armour, the concentrated defenses of his unmarred grace, reflected light and gave his appearance a pearly look. He'd never felt more powerful and more complete than he'd felt in this form, in this realm - and he'd thrown it all away. 

Fifteen feet ahead of him, Sam finally turned, but he wasn't looking at Gadreel. It took the older a moment to realise it was because Sam was _afraid_ to see, but of course he was; just as the Garden was a memory he carried in him, the true form of an angel was something he'd instinctively shy from. That was the way things were, the natural order of the supernatural world. At least he wasn't on his knees and he wasn't crying but he stood as brave as Gadreel knew him to be.  
He was lost as well: where would he go here? What had Gadreel brought him here for? Surely it wasn't just for a walk in the memory. 

_I told you my version of the story,_ the sentry spoke to him over the connection they shared rather than even attempting to voice it in fear the words would fall out in true Enochian, _I can show you the full truth. I can show you what no one else has ever seen, because I have been ashamed, and there have been few to ask._  

Sam's head jerked up - his eyes squinted in the reflected light but Gadreel couldn't hurt him now, not with a memory of what he'd been before. As akin as this form was to his true form, it wasn't the real thing: its light was just a shadow of the grand glory of the Shield of Eden, the _wall of God_ that his name heralded, the angel that Gadreel had once been but no longer was. He was a dimmed, scarred shade of this celestial form, nothing in comparison to the hero Gadreel. In truth he was just a prisoner, half-redeemed with a heavy chain still joining him to the darkest pit in all of Heaven. Nothing much, nothing important, in comparison to what he'd once been. But that brightness was still enough to make a human uncomfortable.

"And if I find you as guilty as God did?"

Gadreel felt his wings bending around him, an additional layer of protection that he didn't need but instinctively took regardless. At his feet, the grass bent like it had been hit by a blast of wind from above.  
 _Then I accept your judgement, as I accepted God's._  

"If I leave you like He did?"

This man knew what mattered to him, Gadreel had to admit it. He turned his vision down, the golden aura on him wavering as if struck by the same wind that had blown across the ground. 

"You really care about me. I don't get it, Gadreel - why me? Because you feel like you owe me for what you did to me?"

_Because you are humanity, Sam Winchester; you are what I failed. Your compassion, your forgiveness, your perseverance - I've yet to meet another who was as pure as you are._  

"So you think I'm perfect. Well, I'm not."

_Precisely._  

The answer seemed to take Sam by surprise, and he hesitated. Then, slowly, he took one more step back towards Gadreel.  
"The whole time you've been with us, this is what you wanted to tell. _This_ is what's making you so goddamn anxious that you can't stay still, isn't it? The truth. The whole truth. You just want someone else to look at it and tell you if you did it, if you're really guilty as charged. You want _humanity's_ opinion. Look, I don't have to see it. I'm not - I'm no one. And I can still tell you what you need to know. So if you'd hear me out - if you'd spare me from needing to look at Lucifer a single more time, and just let me tell you the truth the way that I see it." 

There was no chance for Sam to miss how the angel's whole attention was on him, concentrated upon his form and his words like there was no world beyond him at all.

"I'm not humanity. I'm just a guy, Gadreel. And I wasn't there. I didn't see you let Lucifer in. I don't think anyone did, and that's why you want to show someone."  
The man paused for a moment, his eyes taking in the sight of Eden around them as shredded clouds rolled over the sun.  
"I get it," he continued then as if still collecting his thoughts, "I wish people would see my crimes too and tell me it's alright, that I did what I thought was right. The truth is, you screwed it up, I screwed it up, and nothing will change that. But you can't cling onto it, you - you can't reduce yourself to it. You made a mistake, so learn from it. You need to stop running, you need to stop - stop trying to fix it. It's gone, it's over. You can't change it and no matter what you do, you can't take it back. The only thing that matters is that you can still get it right, that what you do today, that's what counts. You're not _just_ the guy who let the serpent in, not unless that's what you let yourself become. You're so much more than that. And you know what the price is? You have to keep living. You have to live, because if you die, then that's it. That's your legacy. And all the things you could have done are gone, too. I don't know what you did in that cell, and I don't really want to know the whole truth, but Cas said you made a sacrifice to get him out, and he told me the things you said, probably to guilt trip me into helping you. That's a nice start, but it's a goddamn cop-out, Gadreel, and you _know_ that. You can't just leave that burden on someone else and die for the cause, that's not how you fix it. If you want to protect humanity, then _protect humanity_. You fucked up twice but have you ever counted the times you got it right? All those days that you didn't let Lucifer through, each of the people you saved after the fall? Have you ever matched the numbers and realised that each and every life you save, each thing you get right, matters just as much as the things you got wrong and the lives you couldn't save?"

Gadreel wasn't sure if the rain was from his memory or if it had been summoned by the sheer amount of willpower Sam was putting into his words. He couldn't say anything, and his whole being was still attached to every word the younger spoke like it was his lifeline, even when the words hurt like lashes upon his form.

"I'm not pure," the younger finally spat out, "I'm the furthest thing from pure. I will never be pure. I'll never not be the boy with the demon blood, the abomination, the - the stupid kid who let Lucifer out of his cage. But hell if I'm not trying to make my life count for something more."  
The green in his eyes seemed to spark with something more when he raised his eyes and looked at Gadreel now that the sun wasn't blinding him.  
"So you let Lucifer in the Garden. _Who cares?_ "

 

* * *

 

They were under lockdown again. Sam accessed the system through his phone and wished he could have called Charlie to solve the issue: to figure, in essence, why this kept happening. The security cameras showed nothing as far as he could tell from the crap quality stream, and the outside world seemed to be facing dawn in full silence. A jackrabbit charged across the road as Sam watched, but that was the only point of interest that he could find, and when his phone's battery dropped below 15% he gave up. With an air of defeat he decided that if it wasn't Dean, it wouldn't come in, and if it was Dean and chose to come in, then it could and he wouldn't stop it.

With the phone's screen off, the room was covered in the darkest darkness it had so far faced; he'd turned on the sensor-triggered lighting and now that nothing had moved, the corridor was as void of light as the room itself was. Next to him, Gadreel was breathing steadily and slowly, fingers still entwined with his; with a crooked half of a smile Sam brought the screen of his phone across the angel's chest to see how he was healing. Well enough, it seemed; it was time to take the stitches out of the wound now, or at least whenever the older would find it in him to wake up.  
With the phone's screen off once again, Sam threw the useless thing on the bed next to him, stretched the half of his body that he could move and yawned. The flow of energy that still drew life from him felt like a drug that separated him from the ache that he felt whenever he was off it, and while a part of him wanted to mourn, the most of him just wanted to forget, so he did. He was betraying everything by doing that, but he was so tired - after all these years, how did anyone expect him to put up with more? Of course, there was nothing and there would be nothing he wanted more than to have Dean safely back home. But Dean had made his decisions, and if he'd want help, he would first need to resurface somewhere. Until he would, Sam just had to wait. 

Finally, after wasting another ten minutes in bed, the man turned and although he'd intended to try and wake the other up he now instead found himself curling up again. He reached for the blanket's edge and brought it up to his ear, the part of the cover that stretched over to Gadreel's shoulder now effectively resting over his face. There was little air in there but it was warm and his body still felt heavy from sleep, and the thought of staying there forever appealed to him a whole lot more than breaking the connection for long enough to grab his laptop and make the usual round of check-ups and check-ins and to send the emails that had been waiting for much too long by then. He allowed his eyes to close and hoped for sleep: what he found instead was a hand entering his hair, brushing it back and behind his ear before falling along his neck up to his shoulder. It grabbed the curve gently before retreating across the space between them, leaving the parts touched tingling and cold. Now Sam's heart was suddenly pounding and he found his breath trapped in his lungs, and when it escaped, it did so as a shaky little gasp. It was a needy one, expressing an unspoken wish or half a prayer that he'd be brave enough to lean in to look for another gesture like the one he couldn't believe he'd just felt, but he was frozen and afraid of the implications of doing so; unable to move, unable to stop wishing he wasn't all of those things or at least that he'd still been drunk enough to not care.

After a minute of stillness, he gathered the courage to at least move his hand, the one trapped with Gadreel's, and brought the whole knot up and between them in the little space that remained to resume bloodflow where he now had a feeling of numbness instead.  
The movement prompted an adjustment in both their poses; as he curled up more, his knees pressed into the legs of the older's, and to retain the approximate way Gadreel was resting he shifted the balance by bringing his free hand over Sam's waist. They remained under the blanket like a pair of unborn twins, life pulsing between them through the soul link, and something unspoken separating the halves like there was no open gateway between them at all, only the common reality that surrounded them yet separated them from the world outside.   
The younger kept his eyes closed, and before he fell asleep again, he felt the older's chin press against the top of his head and his body shift closer still.  
He'd rarely felt as safe and protected as he felt then; rarely as good in the midst of a situation so hopeless and dark.

 

* * *

 

The next time Sam opened his eyes, the corridor's lights were on. At first his heart jumped with hope, but as his mind woke up, he already knew to look for the most plausible source of motion to trigger them, and there, sitting at the side of the bed with eyes upon him was Gadreel, still wearing the set of clothes Sam had borrowed him and hair sticking up and into every each direction. No part of them was touching and the void that the younger felt was soon explained by the absence of the other sentience tied to him - a heavy sigh left him and he wished he hadn't slept at all, for now falling back asleep to soothe that pain in him was impossible.  
But he had to get up, regardless of time and regardless of his wishes. As much as he wished for it to be that way, there wasn't a private world for just him and this angel that survived on what he gave him like some exotic pet that would inevitably turn wild and fierce in time again. Outside, somewhere in the world of grocery stores and demonic possession, time still flowed as it always had, and he had to join that world again even if it would be just for the emails and nothing more. 

Sam wasn't sure which he hoped for more: that it was just the emails and nothing more, or that he'd get a lead, any lead, that would allow him to charge through the door and into the Impala and drive anywhere at all. When he pulled his rested body up from the bed and found himself face to face with the wounded celestial, he realised it was either or. Here was something that kept him sane - the madness of the road would come in time. 

"What happened to your brother, Sam?" 

"I don't want to talk about it."  
The words dropped from the younger's lips before he could even examine them closer, but he truly did not wish to voice the answers. His feet landed on the cold floor and he felt stiff and sore from the pose he'd slept in as much as the terrible quality of rest he'd gotten lately. He had no choice, however; if he wasn't going to give Gadreel the answers, then Castiel would have to, and Castiel was the third best option only after Dean himself.

"Metatron happened to him," Sam finally pushed through.  
With a certain desperate sense of confidence, of challenge, he turned his eyes to Gadreel and saw the immediate understanding of the full meaning of the words and perhaps more, perhaps of the consequences as well. Regardless, he had to give the full truth of it, even if Gadreel already knew - someone rising from the dead was worth a confirmation at the very least, and in Sam's case, only that would explain the full depth of his grief, worry, concern and fear.  
"And then, because of the Mark, he walked out anyway. And now he's in the wind - with _Crowley -_  and I can't do anything about it. That's everything I know. So, you want breakfast?" 

The angelic head tilt was something that Sam hadn't expected, but it was the response he got regardless. With a huff he stood up and stretched his neck, doing his very best to not look in order to make clear that the conversation was over unless Gadreel would contribute to the new one he'd opened at the end.  
His social stiffness had to drop the moment the angel stood up; one sway was enough to make him instinctively grasp the older's arm, and as he did so, the link was open again and the experience wiped the nausea and the renewed pain of loss from him and replaced those with the fulfilling knowledge of connection and unity instead.  
"Wow, hey, take it easy."   
He held his hand where it was when the other's fingertips slid along his knuckles, trying to get an eye contact to the angel who was decisively looking elsewhere. Instead, after a moment of hesitation, Gadreel gave him a reply instead.

"Breakfast would not make me feel any worse." 

Sam couldn't help letting a lone rough and quiet chuckle at the response.  
"You know, I'm pretty sure you're right."

 

* * *

 

"Hey, Gadreel. I want to ask you something."

"Anything."

Sam tore off the skin of the orange he'd been holding and ate a piece out of it, his eyes upon the angel and the cup of strawberry yoghurt in front of him.  
"How's that taste like?"  
The thing about angels, especially in conversation, was that they never stopped staring. There were very few things that could break the intimidating eye contact if the angel addressed wasn't keen to avoid it for their own reasons, as Gadreel often enough was. Now he wasn't avoiding anything, and Sam had noticed something new about the way he presented himself; he seemed to have discovered not only some skills in interaction but a whole array of facial expressions, some subtle enough to fly past a much more socially experienced angel like Castiel, and usually these were thrown in the mix when Sam expected to see none, like now that Gadreel finally turned his gaze from him and towards the carton of yoghurt, brows lifting in a disimpressed manner. 

"Of 'dairy and natural flavourings'," he read from the side of the container, glancing at Sam to find him equally unimpressed, "I can taste the variety of processes this product has gone through, and the high stress levels of the animals the milk came from. The 'natural flavourings' include a variety of toxins and the taste of the fertilizers used in both the feed of the animals and in growing the berries, which have soaked in the mix for much longer than a berry naturally would remain edible."

"In short, the food's crap, and that's exactly what you're tasting. You know, I agree. Here."  
Sam tore another piece out of the orange and handed it to Gadreel.  
"How about that?" 

"Is there a deeper purpose to this conversation that I am not aware of?" the older asked, but while he waited for the response that never came, he did as Sam had requested and tasted the fruit - the sourness was enough to prompt an initial reaction, a faint twitch in his expression, which pleased Sam more than whatever would follow ever could.  
He loved the taste himself: these weren't the best oranges he'd ever eaten, but they weren't the worst either. The fact was further highlighted by the knowledge that he'd nearly not bought them: after all, what difference did it make if he had fresh food to consume, when his appetite was as good as gone? Yet here they were regardless, and with his foot over Gadreel's under the table to keep the link intact and his mood above the level of terrible, he had to admit it did matter what he ate, even if it only mattered to him and only when his misery was halved between himself and the angel, who now seemed to have finished gathering up the summary for the fruit's components. 

"It tastes of... citric acid, traces of poisonous chemicals and tainted water. I doubt these are the kinds of answers you wanted to hear, but it is your fault that you asked."

Sam snorted. He brushed across his sticky lips with the back of his palm and nodded.  
"I won't be making that mistake again," he noted with a hint of a grin that toned into a smile at the sight of the older smiling in turn.  
"You're making it sound like having breakfast is the worst thing that's ever happened to you." 

"I would not call it that," Gadreel replied in a mildly amused tone of voice, "I would rather say that I am indifferent about it. Even supported by your strength my vessel requires this for energy, yet I cannot experience the enjoyment as you would. It is a means to an end for me." 

"Oh my God."  
Sam pressed his thumbs over his eyes and chuckled.  
"This is the worst morning of my life. Just shut up and eat. Forget I ever said anything."  
His hands returned upon his lap and from his lap to the orange, and he could feel the juice from the latter upon his brows and around his eyes as a stickiness that he should have accounted for before wiping his hands all over his face. The link vibrated with amusement from them both, as if the feeling was doubled; clearly even if the yoghurt was an experience the sentry would have rather hoped to avoid, the conversation had been more to his liking.  
"Speaking of how you need to suffer the cheap and craptastic breakfast, how are you feeling?"

"If this question aims to find out how soon I will find the door on my own -"

"Oh, come on. I didn't mean that."

"- my condition has improved. I can find the bathroom on my own. That is progress."

There was a but coming, and Sam didn't know what it was, not beforehand and not even if he pushed the link. It wasn't a question of how much he'd progressed but rather _how_ he had progressed, and while Gadreel was gathering up his thoughts, Sam realised he didn't feel too hungry anymore. In fact, the usual nausea was back and so was the heaviness in him, and that could only mean there was a full amount of it in them both; that instead of halving the pain, they were now carrying the whole of it together.  
In the pale, bright light of the kitchen's multiple fluorescent lamps, the awareness of absence and unspoken things lingered heavy upon them both. 

"I do not feel much improvement in the condition of my grace," Gadreel finally managed to speak, "and I fear the damage may not be as easy to fix as we've expected."

Sam nodded slowly. His mind was elsewhere, but this was information he realised he'd already known. He'd sensed it or felt it in them both that the other's condition might be permanent, and that word remained between them like an echo, a hidden thought, that neither of them dared to use directly. It was too heavy to spell out loud. 

"So you'll be having crappy breakfasts for a little longer than this week," he finally said with half a grimace.

"So it would seem."


	7. Trust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We always see our worst selves. Our most vulnerable selves.   
>  We need someone else to get close enough to tell us we’re wrong. Someone we trust.”  
>  _\- David Levithan, Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List_

* * *

 

Castiel wasn't getting any better either.  
"I've used who I can," he said, "I have as many eyes and ears looking for Dean as I could offer. You do know that I am trying, don't you?"

Sam nodded, perhaps too quickly.  
"Of course. Of course," he assured the older, "He's - Cas, if he doesn't want to be found, he won't be found. I mean, we know basically nothing of him. He's not using the usual - the usual anything; I've checked, I've triple-checked, and it all comes back to nothing."

"I know."  
The angel sighed and finally lifted his arm from around Sam's shoulders. It had hung heavy there for the past minute or so.  
Fresh air flooded through the open door before Sam finally had the heart to close it.

"About the eyes and ears, Cas," he said after a moment had passed, "I need to ask a favour."

"What is it?"  
There was heaviness, weariness in the seraph's tone that made Sam hesitant to pull through. But it _was_ important.

"We've been on lockdown for, like, five times since you brought Gadreel in. I can't seem to figure out why, so if you have anyone - anyone at all who could stand guard for the bunker grounds, that'd be much appreciated."

"Do you think it could be him?"

"Who?"

"Dean."

Sam shivered.  
"No. I mean, I don't know, but probably not. I don't actually - I don't put it past him that he could be sneaking around every night at three in the morning, managing to avoid all the cameras and all the traps, I mean, I've hunted with the guy for my whole life. I know what he's capable of. God knows what he's capable of _now_. But I just - I think he'd avoid coming back, Cas. I think it'd - I just can't believe he wouldn't still be _Dean_ , you know. It's not like he's lost his whole personality. It's still him, and Dean would be ashamed to come back like that. So I - I really don't think it's him."  
Or so he hoped, and didn't hope, and hoped again.

Castiel nodded. He was leaning to the wall and seemed unwilling to come further in, and with his unusually pale complexion and weary looks Sam knew it was because he was tired.  
Then, as if remembering he was still in company, the seraph perked up and turned to look at Sam.  
"How is Gadreel?" he asked, concerned.

Sam felt his mouth twitching; at least about Gadreel he had good news to share.  
"He's better. A lot better, actually, or at least he stays up for longer than fifteen minutes at a time."

"Can I speak with him? In private, Sam, if you don't mind."

"Sure. Family matters?"

"You could call them that."  
A crooked smile crossed Castiel's lips and there was a certain fondness in his eyes that Sam couldn't associate with any particular subject. Yet he didn't mind; with Castiel showing up at the doorsteps, he still hadn't sent out any emails. He'd managed as far as to read the ones he'd received - nothing of importance, or at least nothing he would have considered as such under the current circumstances - and would need at least thirty minutes to get the other half done. He doubted Castiel would stay much longer than that, but also that he wouldn't stay for much less either.

As for the rest of the day, the thought of staying in bed wasn't exactly the least appealing anymore.

 

* * *

 

"Brother," Castiel breathed out in relief, and Gadreel barely flinched to the feel of the younger on him; the embrace was tight and needy and full of the ache of slowly dispersing worry and fear, and it felt good, even if he had no idea how he was supposed to respond to it.  
"It's so good to see you."

"You as well, my friend."  
He had a smile on him that he didn't hesitate showing, but it was still a timid one; there was a different kind of tension between him and this other angel than there was between him and Sam, and despite all they'd been through, he still felt worry for what the other was thinking of him. Needlessly, he realised; Castiel out of them all would hold no grudges towards him nor keep any negative views of him, but it was hard to believe, as for so many times the sight of another's halo had only served as a prelude to more hatred and pain for him. All the same, at least he could now make apart that halo, as dim as the vision was.  
"You come alone. I sense a purpose in it. Would you sit down - I would stand up for you, but I am still weak."

"No need, brother. I can use the rest myself."

The manner in which Castiel sat down made Gadreel realise that in no more than a few days their roles would be reversed: he would be the stronger one, and Castiel the one struggling to stay on his feet. The thought soured the happiness he felt at seeing him, but he forced it out of his mind and concentrated on the now and on whatever Castiel would need of him in it.

"I wanted to ask you about Sam," the younger started almost apologetically, as if he was somehow insulting Gadreel by making inquiries about someone whom the older was in the best position to tell him about, "Primarily - he seems to be coping... too well."

"He is not coping well, I can assure you. But he knows how to set his priorities, and he goes to great lengths to convince himself he is doing much better than he is."

The look they exchanged was from Gadreel's part almost regretful and from Castiel's defeated and submissive. He'd known to expect the news.  
"Do you think I did him a disservice when I - when I brought you here?"

A faint smile passed Gadreel and he shook his head.  
"I would argue the contrary," he stated confidently, "He seems to feel better when he has something solid to measure his usefulness with. Or it is possible that he simply enjoys seeing me suffer and embarrass myself repeatedly and excels at keeping it a secret from me, but he does not seem the type."  
To his relief, Castiel knew to chuckle at the latter part.

"I was worried," the seraph admitted, "I thought - with all that was going on - it was selfish of me to think I could possibly burden him with something of, well, your scale. I hope that you know what I mean. Not that you are a burden, but -"

"My condition was a burden. I know. I live with that."

"You are a hero, Gadreel, but you're more than just that to me, and your survival - it couldn't have been a higher priority, especially when we already have lost so many. But... to ask Sam for so much, especially with the past you share with him - I wasn't thinking clearly."

"I do not know much of what happened upon the day you brought me here but I assure you, I think my presence has given him strength. He thrives when he sees that he can help others, that he matters."

"I'm just happy that he hasn't been alone. You have... you have spoken, have you not?"

"Quite a lot more than I expected," Gadreel confirmed, happy to see the concern on the other easen, "I think it has been a relief for us both. I hope that he feels the same."

Castiel nodded, and although he still seemed tired, at least the worry on him had lessened, and if there had been guilt upon his shoulders, it had now been lifted. He cast a look at Gadreel and smiled, and there was a certain calm in the smile that Gadreel had never seen before.  
"He seems less reserved about you," he said, "and that makes me happy."

Gadreel nodded.  
"Can you tell me of Heaven? Any news on that front?"

"Nothing much. We've yet to figure out how to reopen it, but it doesn't seem hopeless. We're trying to reach as many angels as we can and call them home, but many more than I feared have cut themselves off the usual means of communication."

"That does not surprise me as much as it should."

There was first an ounce of surprise in Castiel's eyes, but when he'd looked at Gadreel for long enough, he seemed to make a connection and laughed instead.  
"I keep forgetting," he said cheerfully but apologetically at the same time, "that being Metatron's second-in-command required your presence with him. No wonder it doesn't surprise you to hear others have... 'opted out' of the mess entirely. I was shocked when I found out - but it is only because I spent half of the year trapped with no means to connect back to you. I couldn't imagine anyone willingly choosing ignorance. But you do put it in context."

"I seem to be cut off as well," Gadreel noted, bringing the conversation back to present time, "but it does not make me as uneasy as I expected. I suppose that I am either tired of the fighting, or simply used to the silence."

The seraph laid his hand over the taller's shoulder and offered him a smile and a warm look.  
"Once you've recovered," he spoke in a confident tone, "I promise you that the unity you return to will be one that you do not have to turn away from. Well, most importantly, that there'll be a unity to return to. That's proving a little difficult. The factions are not entirely gone yet, and most want nothing to do with one another. It is a long, rough path we've come from the days we could call ourselves a family."

Gadreel nodded.  
"If we ever could," he sighed, feeling lightheaded and weak again, "The family I remember seems a distant memory now, like a dream."  
For the first time, he didn't feel the blame for it. Their troubles had always ran much deeper than a single sentry's bad decisions, as horrible and grand in scale as they had been. He wasn't the one responsible for this mess - he was just another symptom of the underlying causes that were too painful to heal and much easier to cover up with hatred and violence instead.  
"I think I need some rest. I am sorry, brother, I would wish for nothing more than to keep up this conversation, but as you said, I am still weak."

"I understand. I've stayed longer than I can afford as well."

Gadreel laid his hand over the younger's arm and smiled the best he could through the mist that now reigned his vision.  
"It is an honour for me to be thought of as a brother by someone like you, Castiel. Know that you were the first to consider me such in a long, long time."

"It is an honour to be a brother to you, Gadreel. The only thing I regret is that it took me so long to give you the benefit of doubt; if only I had been there earlier."

"I put much effort into making sure no one knew, and by the time you found out, it was much too late for me to even ask for a second chance. Yet you gave me just that. I do not care about the reasons: whether you wanted to reach out to me from the kindness of your heart or if you were driven to it because you had no other choice, it is still what gave me hope, and you never abandoned me again. For that, I am thankful and indebted to you. If there is anything you need, Castiel, just let me know and I will do my best to help you."

The younger nodded, seemingly speechless. Then, with half a chuckle, he stood up but his hold of Gadreel's shoulder never loosened.  
"You owe me nothing, brother. You've already given enough."

 

* * *

 

Gadreel slept the rest of the day. He awakened, confused and trembling with a new fever, to some sound that he thought he'd heard that didn't belong in the darkness, but it was hard to tell through what felt like a new flood of water trickling into his ears and filling them until his every breath echoed in the dark and nothing else got through.  
His fingertips slid across the space next to him, then on the other side, and he opened his eyes although it was of very little use; the only source of light shone from the other end of the corridor, and it was a dim golden glow that only lit the doorway, not the room itself.

The sentry held his breath and waited, half of his body up from the bed and the remaining parts each feeling like they were not only made of lead but also cast in cement and carved into a part of the bed's frame so that he would never move a single inch from it again. In truth the only thing weighting him down was the thickness of the blanket that he vaguely remembered pulling over himself earlier in the day. Nothing much seemed to have changed since, but the noise wasn't in his head. Another loud crash and the sound of something shattering carried up to him through the partially open door, freezing time for him for the smallest of moments before he'd already stood up. His legs weren't holding - he was much too weak to walk - but nothing was stopping him, not even after he'd lost balance and barely caught the door's frame to keep him on his feet. He paused to breathe and listened to more sounds, a sharp pain at his core heralding the blade that he was consciously forcing to manifest out of what little grace he had left to himself, a task which had already been difficult for him before due to the intentional, precise damage torture had dealt him in order to prevent him from doing just that, and which now was more suicidal than his determination to cross the corridor. Even though he could feel vertigo shaking his horizon he pushed himself onwards, the smooth material of his concentrated grace more tightly in his grip than he felt himself remain tied to his skin.

The floor wasn't necessarily made of stone; it felt like every other step he took sunk deep into it like there was moss there instead, and although he was certain the light still shone at the end of the corridor, it was so dim and blacked out that he didn't know where exactly the stairway started. He made it to the doorway regardless and stopped to listen again. For a minute, perhaps a full two, the only sound he could register was that of his vessel's heart trying its hardest to calm down despite the fever that was burning him up, but then he heard shuffling, turning, and a loud bang as a piece of furniture hit the wall.  
The following moment was a blur to him; at the end of it he found himself standing at the door of Sam Winchester's bedroom, one hand upon the frame of the door and the other gripping the blade, and his eyes were fixed into those of the younger's. Sam was standing in the middle of the room by an overturned table, paper and books and pens and a broken cup on the floor around him. He was breathing heavily and Gadreel didn't need any further clues to know that he was drunk as well, but this wasn't Sam - Sam had never been the type to drink and destroy. This was a vessel for pure unadultered emotion breaking free and this wasn't something he could fight, so his stance fell apart and his hold upon the blade loosened. Sam was still staring at him, but not for much longer: even in his drunken state he was barely slower than the angel whose reflexes and judgement were dulled by the injuries he'd sustained. As if Gadreel was nothing but thin air to him, the man took the nearest object - another book that had been marked from three different points and left open on his bed upon which clothes remained scattered - and threw it across the room near but not at the angel still standing in the doorway.

He had tears on his cheeks and perhaps it was the spell that transferred his feelings to Gadreel or simply the strength of them that radiated from his aura alone, but the vast depth of his grief and anger and frustration was so overwhelming that the sentry felt it in his bones like it was a fresh but familiar addition to the ache that his blood already carried within him. With enormous effort he ordered the blade to withdraw back into him and, once unarmed, walked across the mayhem and did the only thing he could think of. He brought his hands over Sam's wrists and grabbed them, forced his hands up and against his arms much like the younger had done to him earlier and held him still, hoping it would ground him where he was.

"Sam," he called the other's name out loud to summon him back to the present from wherever his thoughts had brought him from there.  
He didn't manage more before he was pushed back; the strength in the younger was vastly superior to that of his weakened body, but Sam was just a man. The light in the ceiling flickered, dimmed and went out, then flickered back to life. The room seemed to swim before Gadreel's eyes but his concentration was upon Sam, and Sam was most definitely still where he'd been before with his own strength now flowing to Gadreel through the opened connection as the older stood up straight and caused the floor to tremble underneath them. From the human's eyes he could see the blue light from his own and with great pain and effort, he spread his wings behind him, the hold of his hands loosening their grips as the younger's struggle ceased. Clarity returned to Sam's gaze and he seemed to remember, as if suddenly, who he was and where he was, and the link between them flickered like the lamp in the ceiling and those in the corridor as his emotion turned from the chaotic madness it had been before to confusion and then anger again. He pushed and managed to bend Gadreel's arms back just enough for them to press against his chest, but that was all he had the power for anymore: now it wasn't flesh against flesh but flesh against grace, and flesh would always lose that battle. He struggled, yelled a word or two that Gadreel couldn't hear for the sole reason that he wasn't listening, and he felt the man's spirit itself lash against him through the connection between them, piercing his grace like a needle pushing through the handler's fingertip. 

"Let me go!"

The lamp above them shattered. With it, so did the projections of Gadreel's wings upon the walls behind them, and as his concentration faded, the lamps in the corridor flickered back to life instead. He hadn't let go, but Sam wasn't pulling away either; instead, he was now leaning into the hold, hands fisted and eyes closed and head bent down. In a moment's time, as if the remaining anger in him was hesitant to let go but ceased naturally despite his unwillingness to submit, his body leaned forwards and fell onto Gadreel's. His face pressed into the angel's chest and his fists loosened, and there was a deep quiet between them that didn't only span the physical world but the link between them just the same. The older closed his eyes and breathed deep, the strength from the younger's soul the only thing keeping him on his two feet. Sam had to know it: Sam had to be just as aware as he was that the show had been just that. There was no fear in the younger, he was merely tired to death and so devastated that there were no words to express such a feeling or even begin to describe the manner in which that experience had become the whole of him. He wasn't even strong enough to cry so he simply stood there, face buried into Gadreel and breathing so calmly that it seemed as if he was sleeping, but there was no rest in him. As they remained in that pose, Gadreel could hear his heart drumming violently in his chest - the sound was a match for his own, even if the rhythm in him wasn't as quick, only unreliable and counting twice the beats per pulse.

"He died in my arms," the man spoke into the shirt he'd borrowed to the older, voice barely audible, "I couldn't do anything. And then I let him walk out, just like that. I don't know where he is. How can I live with myself? The only thing I ever did, the only thing I ever _do_ , is just disappoint him and let him down. I deserved to die. I deserved to die, so why the hell am I still alive? Why can't I die instead? Why do I have to live when the only thing I'm good at is running away from the only places, the only people I should never turn my back to? I keep failing them. I keep failing them all."

"That is not who you are," Gadreel told him, closing his eyes to keep the dizziness at bay, "I know what it feels like, but that is not who you are or what you do. You cannot carry the whole world on your shoulders, Sam Winchester. You are just one man."  
He'd pressed his face down into the other's hair hoping it would make him feel safer, cared for, or at least that it would make him listen. Sam, while in full height taller than he was, now stood in a slouched pose like the pain in him was physically forcing him to double over, and Gadreel could feel the confusion and insecurity from him like it was his own.

"I just want it to end. I... wanted to end it."

"I know."  
Was this where an apology belonged?  
"I am sorry."  
It was worth the try. 

Sam's hands found the fabric of the other's shirt and held onto it, the grip loose and lost and barely a hold at all. He breathed and breathed and, although little of them was touching directly, his life force still trickled into Gadreel to keep him standing. Despite it, the older was feeling weaker and fainter the longer they stood there and the fever that was biting him was doing so ever harder, but whatever it would take, he wouldn't let this become about himself. Sam had held this in for days: he could ignore his own needs for ten minutes more to let the storm run its course.

"No," the man finally spoke, "No, you're not."  
He pushed back and let go; Gadreel's hand, while it lingered upon his shoulder, didn't touch his skin and couldn't uphold the link, so the connection broke. The air became heavy, the floor a swamp; his weight shifted to his right leg and the knee felt like it might not hold, and inside him, the familiar leak of living fire made itself known as his grace broke free from its shell. He swallowed and concentrated on breathing, but there seemed to be a layer separating him from the physical world and he felt sick as he tried to reach it again.  
"You don't know what you should be sorry about, so you're not sorry. You have no idea." 

"I do know, Sam."  
The words seemed to follow the motions of his mouth delayedly, and even if that part functioned, it took much too long for them to pass from him to the vessel as orders to be performed.  
"I do know what it feels like to live only to know you failed the one thing you should have never failed. How it feels like to owe everything to not only the world, but to the one you loved the most, for that failure. I know. And I know - and I know you know that I do - how it feels like to wish for death, if only to be free from the burden of guilt, to never have to look into another's eyes again and know what you did to them. Do you not see how your struggle is my struggle? Who in this world would know your burden better than I do?" 

"Who the hell did you ever love?"

"I loved humanity. I stand here and I look at you and I know what I did. I know that without my crime, this weight would not rest upon you. And I beg of you that you do not look past me and think that you are the only one who bears the blame. Its roots go deeper than you. The curse that has taken hold of your brother, it too has its history. It does not begin with you, and though many chapters do, we cannot yet say for certain that it is to end with you. What I do know is that you have not given up like I did; that your choice is still to fight for what you believe is true. But you need to rest, and you need to forgive yourself. At least let go of the blame. This is not your fault."

Sam took two more steps back, his bare foot crushing one of the porcelain shards on the floor and causing him, with some delay, to hiss and look down at the sole of his foot where the skin had broken and blood dripped out, but it seemed in the dim light cast from the corridor past Gadreel's form that nothing had entered the flesh. An air of defeat flooded into the other's aura and he turned entirely, limping unsteadily to his bed and sitting down upon it, both feet on the ground as if the bleeding didn't matter.  
With great effort Gadreel followed him there, even though he wasn't sure if he'd been invited: he had little choice to the contrary, given that his own legs were failing him. 

"He needs me," Sam said quietly.  
"That's the only reason I exist." 

"He is not the only one who needs you, Sam."

The younger looked at him, eyes unfocused and disbelieving. Then, with a sigh, he looked down again and let out a laughter that could only be described as antagonising.  
"Oh - yeah, sorry, I forgot that if I die, you die. That - that _'_ _if there ain't no me, there ain't no you_ _'_." 

Gadreel felt like hissing in turn, but instead, he just watched his horizon tilt.  
"That is not what I mean." 

"Have you always been like that? So - so damn good at pretending you're someone else? Dean - Ezekiel - even _me_. It's like you'd rather be anyone else."  
Sam's hand wrapped around his, slowly and more certainly than anything else he'd done since deciding to wreck the room, but it was as if it happened without his consent, so determined he was in his efforts to pretend it didn't happen. He wasn't looking at Gadreel, he was staring at the door, but the first thing the link between them did was take from Gadreel to close the bleeding wound at the sole of the younger's foot. He didn't seem to notice: that consumed he was by the pain that the angel had no power to heal.  
"It's pathetic. You're - you're pathetic."

"I never denied that," Gadreel replied, eyes closed again to try and focus his remaining strength to where it was most needed.  
It was true: not even at his best did he have much that was his own. The only thing that he knew to be his was his burden of guilt, and around that he'd built a wall of otherness, something to fill what his imprisonment had taken from him. And despite it, he'd still believed he'd been worth more. The thought now seemed laughable and nothing more: what had there been to redeem when he could not even attack others without becoming Thaddeus, when his sole worth had been in Abner and then in Sam, and when it had turned out that they'd never needed him at all? What would Ezekiel say if he'd known? Gadreel didn't have to imagine it beyond the look of hatred he knew he'd get; someone like him should have never taken the name of someone like Ezekiel.  
"Perhaps I am broken. Does that make what I say any less true? Especially when half of it, as you must have by now realised, is something that _you_ said to me. Things that you think, Sam Winchester. I am merely repeating what you know to be true, what you believe somewhere deep within you. And, I admit, some things that you think are lies but which I believe to be true." 

"So who the hell needs me, Gadreel?"

Gadreel smiled; he couldn't help it. This man was more blinded than he'd ever been.  
"Who does not?" he asked in turn, and gained a deep, frustrated silence. 

_No one needs me,_ the younger's stubborn side spat at them both, _The world would be that much better without me in it._    
But they both knew better, and in a while, when no one bothered to argue with the childish voice that was the only one to speak back, it seemed that the conversation was over. That indeed, for once, Gadreel was right about something.  
Sam was needed, and the only person who'd chosen not to see it was Sam himself. 

_I told you so_ , the sentry noted before he had the chance to stop himself.

A faint, quick and annoyed smile crossed Sam's features.  
 _Shut up,_ he retorted.

 

* * *

An hour passed before Sam gave in and stood up. He tore himself free of the link and pushed a track into the mess he'd made with his feet as he made his way across the room: after the door had closed, no source of light remained, and he walked back to the bed with the faint memory of the pathway's approximate location and the feel of the clutter around him as he walked. To his slight disappointment and an unwanted relief, no shards of anything ended up embedded in his feet before he'd raised them both off the floor and crawled back on the bed where the angel still rested with his back turned towards Sam. His fingers joined effortlessly with Gadreel's, and he felt the angel hold his hand a little tighter in greeting to let him know he was still, or again, awake.  
More drunken than tired he fell on his side and slid his arm over the other's body, pressed his face into the coarse hair at the back of the older's neck and moved as close as he could get. With his shirt lifted just enough for his stomach to press against the angel's back he dared to free his hand for long enough to grab the blanket and pull it over them both, even though a part of his conscious mind objected to the idea and pointed out that with the obvious fever the older was fighting, the combined warmth of them both would turn the bed into an oven soon enough. Sam couldn't find it in him to care, and once he'd grabbed the male's hand again he used the combination of their fingers to pull down his shirt and then settled back to rest in the hopes that he'd fall asleep quickly.  
The mess surrounding them seemed to haunt him in the form of a ghastly pressure that tightened around his body slowly but certainly to keep him in a constant state of discomfort, but his mind was empty enough of thought. He couldn't remember ever having reacted in this way before: more often than not, it had been Dean who'd gotten drunk and wrecked things when his burden got the best of him. Perhaps that was the sole reason Sam had turned to the exact solution now. Perhaps it was his way of coping, a laughable effort at imitating his big brother now that he was alone - again, and no matter what Gadreel told him, it was nobody's fault but his own.

There was certain comfort in that other mess which greeted him when he found himself sinking deeper into the link; the angel had weakened notably since earlier to the day when they'd last shared the connection before this drunken incident, but his grace still pulsed within the flesh and, even though it had barely been an hour since they'd been joined again, the worst bleed had already stopped. Around the core that Sam had learned to find without effort he could feel the awareness that told him that Gadreel was as alert to him as he was to the angel, and even though no thoughts or feelings targeted either from any side, the gateway was open and almost expecting as if they both just wanted the other to begin with something.  
Sam had nothing to say. He realised it clearly, as clearly as he knew that it wasn't because he was lacking thought or even because he was consciously trying to become void of them entirely, but rather because he was afraid to bring this any further than it had already progressed. What "this" was, he didn't know; that was one of the things he tried to keep out of his mind. It was something that was happening - something that had been happening ever since the first time they'd joined hands, or perhaps even before then. It was something that was filling the gaping hole inside Sam's soul and repairing the damage he was constantly inflicting upon himself by allowing the other thoughts to reside within his mind, the ones that had turned him from sending emails not to the stairway but to the whiskey hell, and which had then kept him there for more rounds than he cared to count. But, even if he would have liked it to be so, the reason for his drinking wasn't one hundred percent Dean. It was also _this_ , the fear of coming back upstairs sober, because as long as he was sober and still pressed his body into Gadreel's and breathed him in rather than air, the whole thing remained... complicated. Drunk, he could pretend he didn't need to label it or call it anything. Drunk, it was easier to say _shut up_ and actually quiet down.

This situation couldn't exist. He wasn't - and this was being more honest than he would have allowed himself to be, but he wasn't _in love._ He wasn't even - he didn't get those feelings. He'd never felt anything remotely like attraction to anything male, excluding that one occasion when he'd been perhaps 15 and had that fleeting desire, an urge, to kiss his friend. The situation had called for it, it had had that _spark_ to it, but they hadn't, and later on - after the brief freak-out that had inevitably followed - he'd just been glad he'd skipped the opportunity. That wasn't what this was. He wasn't attracted, he wasn't even curious. The very thought of going further than this was almost entirely unappealing: it wasn't something that had even crossed his mind before now that he had to think of it to make sure it wasn't what he wanted. Yet here he was, the tip of his cold nose brushing against Gadreel's neck, sweaty hand over his, stomach-to-back and hip-to-hip, even his knees and ankles were pressed against the older's legs. And just as much as he didn't want to move forwards, he really hated the thought of moving backwards as well. This was a place he'd crawled to and a place he wanted to stay in. This was safe, this was comforting, this was _good_ . But what was _this_? Furthermore, why was he thinking about it when he'd already decided that he would not?


	8. Longings

* * *

 

"Cas. I need to ask you something."  
The cup of coffee in front of Sam seemed unappealing and his stomach felt like it had a hole burned into it, but at the same time, he needed the drink to wake up and the taste of it was too good to waste. He was wearing nothing but his underwear and the bath robes, and his hair was still more wet than it was dry, yet somehow none of that mattered - Castiel hardly followed visitor etiquette anyway. Sam had very recently realised that he cared about it just as little as the seraph did.

"What is it?"

The younger shrugged absently. He wasn't sure how to phrase this without it sounding awkward - without it sounding exactly like something was happening between him and Gadreel, something that shouldn't have been happening at all, and if it wasn't the spell, then he _really_ didn't want Castiel to know about it. It was the last thing he wanted to inform the angel about and frankly, the social consequences weren't the whole reason. Even his shame wasn't the whole reason. The main root of his hesitation lay with the fact it had nothing to do with Castiel whatsoever. It was something that was strictly between him and the sentry and concerned no one else; it was a private and fragile thing that no one else had any business even knowing about. There was something secret about it that didn't sprout from embarrasment or even from the fear of breaking the unspoken expectations placed upon the situation, but rather from how intimate the connection between them had grown to be.  
And somehow, even as he prepared to ask the question, Sam feared that the reason was not the spell: that this was something that truly existed between them as an aspect to their relationship that had grown into it _naturally_ , because there was nothing about it that he could understand. The only reasonable explanation was that the spell wanted them to make the link possible, which in turn could mean that the desire to reconnect would only grow stronger the more time they spent as one - and that was certainly a thought that made Sam uncomfortable.

"Are there side-effects to the spell? Anything."

Castiel tilted his head, a light frown upon his features. He leaned back in his seat and the worry on him seemed to deepen.  
"What do you mean? Are you - is everything alright?"

"Yeah."  
Sam pushed the cup around and wrapped his fingers around it, although the only thing he really wanted to do was to climb back upstairs and curl up again. He hadn't slept particularly well and the hangover wasn't making it any better, but more than anything, he couldn't get the _need_ out of his system. There was nothing, it seemed, that he'd rather be doing but to stick very close to the angel he'd spent the best part of the year trying to forget.  
"Yeah, everything's alright. I'm just asking."

"Well," Castiel responded, and from the stretched and hesitant manner he spoke it was clear that he was still worried and not taking Sam's answer for truth, "it drains your vitae. That means you'll need much more rest than you usually do, and that you'll be exhausted easily and quickly even if you don't feel like you're doing anything to feel that way. Ignoring that will result in the usual symptoms of dizziness, weakness and drowsiness, perhaps falling asleep when you don't mean to."

"I get that. But it also - it links me to _him_ , right? So there's - there's like this two-way street between us. I can basically hear what he thinks if I try hard enough, and... I don't actually have to try very hard at all. And he can hear me. We can communicate. When I fall asleep, more often than not we're in the same headspace. It's like we're two people in one. That's - that's more what I'm asking about. If there's something psychological or - or related - that I should know about."

"I'm not sure I understand," Castiel replied, seeming genuinely apologetic about it, "I can't think of anything. It's like any interaction between a human vessel and an angel, except that you aren't his vessel and he shouldn't be able to control you in any manner, only his own end of the link."

"Yeah, I think it's working as intended."

"But there's something bothering you."

"It's - I guess it's nothing," Sam sighed in defeat, "I just feel - like I should be there the whole time. I was thinking that maybe that's how the spell works. That maybe it _wants_ to hold the link open."

There was a sequence of emotions on Castiel's face that Sam mapped out from confusion to relief and then to relaxation.  
"The spell doesn't want anything," the seraph assured him, "it's just a binding spell for transferring energy, nothing more. But I'm not surprised that you feel that you should give more than you're already giving. That seems to be your nature. You'd rather give as much as you can than take the time to rest. Don't exhaust yourself."  
There seemed to be weight on the last sentence that Sam felt was a subtle commentary on his state, and he accepted it; what he'd done yesterday hadn't been all too wise and had started his day with more cleaning than he would have preferred.  
Finally he lifted his coffee and drank. It had started to cool down but the milk was creamy enough to keep the taste soft rather than bitter, and at least that much good came out of a hangover. Any other morning he would have drank his coffee black.

"So there's nothing psychological involved."

"Nothing. I can promise you it doesn't affect your mindset or control you in any manner, Sam. But... I do understand if you want to break it."

Sam's head jerked up and his eyes widened slightly at the notion; he realised it too late, much after he'd already reacted.  
"What?" he heard himself ask, "No - no, that's - it's okay. I was just curious."  
  
Castiel raised brows at him, seeming surprised by the reaction he'd gotten. Sam was just the same, but embarrasment burned at his cheeks at the fact that the shock had been as visible in the eyes of the angel's as it had been in his mind.  
"He's not ready yet," he hurried to patch the response, "It doesn't take much to knock him out and I don't think he's healing much or at all when we're not linked. It's - it's okay, I can do this."

The older seemed relieved at his words and nodded.  
"As I said, it might still take a while."

Sam nodded in turn.  
"Gadreel was concerned about his grace," he noted, "He didn't think it was recovering."

"Sam, he destroyed it when he triggered the sigil."  
Castiel seemed uncomfortable at the very thought of it, and Sam didn't have to wonder why; he'd seen enough of angels using themselves as weapons to know that it wasn't something you wanted to be a part of - that Castiel least of all wanted to be a part of. Gadreel was just another name on the list of siblings who had spilled their own blood in his name.  
"Healing damage like that will take - forever. What we're aiming for is just for it to heal enough to sustain him. He's not going to be a soldier or even half the angel he was after the fall for a very long time. That is the price he chose to pay."

"Actually," Sam huffed, "that's the price he paid but not so much the one he chose."

"True enough."

"So I'm not sure how he's taking it, but I guess he'll just need to accept it eventually."

"Do you think he hasn't?" Castiel asked, leaning back towards Sam across the table.

Sam shrugged. He'd spent a large portion of his morning sweeping up the glass from the shattered lamp and he still remembered the bare-bone wings the sentry had shown him the previous night, knowing damn well that it had been a vast overestimation of strength on Gadreel's part, especially with the situation hardly calling for such a display in the first place.  
No, he didn't think Gadreel had accepted the fact that the explosion had left him crippled, and even less that it might be a permanent state for him.  
"I think he's in full denial."

"That... doesn't sound very good at all."

"Yeah, well. I think most people take time."

"Gadreel isn't most people."  
The seraph stood up and walked uncertainly in the stairway's direction, then stopped and sighed and spread his hands as if he'd just lost the thought he'd physically chased there.  
"He is an angel, and I don't trust his judgement on this. I think he still feels responsible for many things that are beyond him, and thinks he needs to fix them. He can't do that. If he thinks he can - and I think you're right, he does - then someone has to tell him the truth. I've been trying to be gentle about it, to tell him he's done enough in the hopes that it'd sink in, but..."

"Cas," Sam called, eyes upon the cup of coffee, "I know you're worried, but you should really take care of yourself first. I'll talk to Gadreel. I think I might even have a chance at making him listen. But you're right, someone has to say it."

 

* * *

 

"Sam."  
The name was a greeting, and it came with a smile. It still surprised Sam to see that on Gadreel: it didn't seem like the kind of a thing he could expect, or a thing that came naturally to the other, yet the longer they spent together, the more often he saw that same small, almost shy expression on him. This one lit up the other's eyes and left no part of him cold, but he had other kinds of smiles as well, the sort that Sam was more accustomed to. This looked nothing like one of those defensive, mocking or aggressive expressions: this kind was genuine.  
"I heard you speak with someone."

"Yeah, with - with Cas. He only had a minute, but he said he'd try to visit you as soon as possible."

"I understand," Gadreel said, more as a reminder than as a polite response, "I do not expect him to pay me a social visit each time he comes here. From what I have learned, there is quite a lot that you are in together. He is a soldier, and he still has battles to fight in, battles that need to be planned. I am glad he has you fighting on his side in some of those."

Sam huffed, hitting the mattress with some heaviness and falling back to look at the familiar ceiling of his own bedroom's. They seemed to have reached some unspoken conclusion to stay here from now on, as neither had even attempted to relocate into the guest bedroom they had so far regarded as the one in which Gadreel would recover.  
"I think I'm in all of his battles. It's like this - this ever-growing list of - we started out just hunting things, you know? For most of my life we were always after that one demon, Azazel, and it took _years_ to even get on his track. But it just kept growing from there. If someone had told me ten years ago that I'd be the guy who ends the apocalypse, I would have looked at them weird and told them to quit the drink. Now I have nightmares about the things that actually happened, and it's not like it stopped there. Heaven's civil wars? Your factions on earth after everyone was cast and locked out of Heaven? The king of Hell, the queen of Hell, the Knights of Hell - my own brother. Jesus. I mean, if there's one thing I'm not involved in, it's the normal world. I have no idea who's leading this country. For all I know, it's probably a collective of leviathans."  
The man let out a long, heavy sigh and grimaced.  
"It's easier with Cas. It's... the best when we're all together. But still, you heard us, didn't you? Asking if we're gonna be okay with just the three of us. And I don't - I really don't think so. We're always too few, but the people we trust, they keep dying. You're a good example."  
He was surprised to hear the amused huff that escaped Gadreel. That was yet another sign of comfort that he'd never expected from him.  
"I mean it. You basically died twice and you worked for the team for less than a _day_."

"I am not known for my good choices."

Sam laughed.  
"Yeah, no, you're not."  
Once he'd fallen serious again, or at least his grin had toned to a softer smile, he sat up again and cast an examining look towards the sentry beside him. Gadreel looked much better than he'd done the evening before, but he was still pale like after severe bloodloss and seemed too weak to get up even if he was making no note of it.  
  
"So... speaking of burdens, how are you coping?" 

"Coping... with what?"  
There was a reservedness in Gadreel's response, as if even though they were not connected by anything now he could somehow still sense that the subject they were headed for was not one that he would enjoy discussing. 

"Your injury. The - the fact that you might not be getting up and into action anytime soon."

"I concentrate on the moment. I... concentrate on recovery." 

"Yeah, right," Sam scoffed, "Like you did yesterday. You were burning up and - just because I act like an idiot doesn't mean you need to risk everything. And what was that with the wings?" 

"I could not reach you. I had to do something." 

"Gadreel, I was right there. You didn't do it for me." 

"I _did_ do it for you." 

"No, you didn't. Look, I don't think you're getting it."  
Sam repositioned himself - one knee up to his chest and his arms around it provided him a sense of confidence, and to Gadreel, it probably just looked like he was readjusting for balance. The sentry was glaring at him like he'd just poked him with a sharp stick, but Sam did his best to ignore the look despite knowing that it was the first warning sign that a wiser man would have heeded without further question.  
"I know the shape you are in, and it's not good. Believe me, I can feel it. Man, I've been possessed twice, and I even know how Cas feels like when he's in power. You don't even get my skin crawling, Gadreel, and it's not because we get along. Peacocking might make you feel better about yourself but it's killing you, and if _that's_ killing you, then what about the rest? You act like you're going to get up one day and just walk out the door and start fighting the bigger fight. But that's _over_ for you. It's not your war anymore." 

It wasn't reservedness anymore. It was fear and anger and trying to escape the feeling of being trapped when there was no denying the fact. In a word, Sam's words were turning Gadreel into that dangerous, unpredictable thing that he'd so often been in the past, and for the first time since accepting him in the bunker, Sam felt the distinctive, sharp sting of fear like a syringe pumping ice in his blood. He'd seen him this way before, when they'd captured him and tied him with binds and spells; this was the same enemy he'd struck when pushed, the same one he'd left with Dean hoping that his brother would make him suffer. And Dean had made him suffer. That had been the first time Sam had realised it wasn't Gadreel's pain that would redeem him from his own, and the first time he'd looked back and felt compassion for the angel. But in this state - in the state before the beating, when he was trapped with no way out, he was worse than a wild animal, and Sam hoped he'd retain the clarity to know that Sam wasn't his enemy now.

"It _is_ my war," the angel spoke, voice sharpened and striking, "How could it not be? I may be weak but I still have my use. I have to do what is right for my family."

"Gadreel, no offense, but I think you've done enough. They're not exactly being -" 

"It does not matter what they are to me. My sacrifice bought few the way back home, the rest are still struggling. I cannot look away from that. Can _you_ look away from your own brother? How can you demand it from me if you cannot turn your own eyes any more than I?" 

Sam swallowed.  
"I'm not dying," he replied calmly, "I'm probably not the most stable guy in the world, but I'm not dying. I can still do what I've always done. And you can't." 

"I was weakened after the fall. It did not stop me."

"Yeah," Sam scoffed, turning his eyes away from the burning look the older was giving him, "Yeah, that was then. You know what I mean. You're not up to that anymore."  
He hadn't been expecting an actual physical pressing of the point, so when the older pulled up on his knees and was suddenly right there, palm upon his chest and eyes flaring - and not only figuratively at that - the only reaction he had was a genuine shock and a jump, hand sliding towards the angel blade hidden much too far from where he was trapped. 

"I know my own strength, Sam Winchester. I suggest you respect it." 

The glow was by no means limited to shining through the angel's eyes. The burn that Sam felt against his chest was the same energy he could see as a faint glow behind the piercing green that was staring him down, but even though his body was still scared - how could it not be - his mind seemed calm and clear enough. He responded to the look the older was giving him and accepted the situation for what it was: he was powerless to defend himself, and this angel was damaged in more ways than he could count. Gadreel had two sides to him: the guardian that remained calm and concentrated when something he was protecting was in danger, the soldier that had no difficulties solving strategic problems or pulling through with missions, and this - this broken husk of an angel so afraid of being chained and restricted that the very prospect of it blinded him with fear, leaving him with no other thoughts but those of an escape. There was no telling whether he was lucid enough to stop before causing real harm, and if Sam would die because of this conversation then it would not be much of a grand ending, but at least it would grant him freedom from the fact that up until that point, he had indeed not been dying. At least it would remove the burden from his shoulders. And still, somehow, he trusted Gadreel. Even in this state, he trusted him, and even though he was still afraid, he couldn't fear for his life.

"I respect it, Gadreel. I respect _you_. And that's the only reason I'm saying these things."  
He placed his hand upon the sentry's and felt a spark enter his flesh like an electric shock, stabbing and overwhelming and sharp like a snakebite, and then nothing. The light in the older's eyes faded and the white fire gathering by his palm was gone like it had never existed. The threat in his eyes fell apart as he turned to look at Sam's hand instead, and he grasped it and held it and closed his eyes, guilt flooding into his expression. 

"I'm okay," Sam assured him.  
He didn't need the link to tell him Gadreel had never intended to hurt him - it was clear from just the way he was crushed by the knowledge that he had regardless.  
"I'm okay. Hey. Listen to me. _I'm alright._ " 

"I'm sorry, I -" 

"I know. It's okay. I just needed to snap you out of it. I'm _fine._ "  
Although the pain had left him breathless, Sam felt a chuckle push through the breaking tension and it relaxed him.  
"You see what I mean? Your show-offs _will_ leave someone dead, and there's no guarantee that it's gonna be you either. You can't threaten me. I don't fear death and I don't fear pain. I'm the same as you. So don't think I don't know what I'm asking of you is the worst thing I could, but you need to understand that there are limits, and you're way, way past yours. Let it go. I'm saying this because I care."

The tense protective curl of the older's pose fell apart as he spoke, but only slightly. Sam watched him slowly raise his eyes back to his and felt the link between them close: whatever Gadreel was thinking, he was making certain that Sam couldn't hear it. Time ticked by and the throbbing burn upon Sam's palm seemed like it might leave a physical blister behind, and that was the thing he concentrated on - it grounded him to the moment, gave him something solid to hold onto as he waited for whatever conclusion the older's quiet musings would bring him to.

"I am a soldier," Gadreel finally said, "That is what I was created to be." 

"Are you?"  
The smile upon Sam's lips was slightly more crooked than he would have preferred.  
"I always thought you were more like a pacifist than a warrior. You strike me as the type." 

Finally - _finally_ \- the tension in the older broke and Sam got another smile out of him.  
"I do not enjoy causing pain or taking lives," the sentry admitted, "but I need a cause. Without that, I am nothing." 

"So find yourself a cause. There's a lot to do around here. I'm pretty damn sure you'll figure it out if you just try. Besides, you don't have such a great track record, no offense. You don't even want to fight and you keep trusting the wrong leaders. I know - I probably shouldn't say more or you'll smite me, but seriously, how many things you've gotten right with violence so far? I think the count's closing in on zero."  
The frustrated twitch of the older's mouth was, for a reason Sam couldn't pinpoint, a sight that he greatly enjoyed.   
"I've got one question to you. Unrelated, I guess, but still," the younger started after a brief irritated silence had announced that Gadreel had nothing to say to him in return.

The flow between them was restored - whatever the other had been hiding would now be open for Sam's prying, but he didn't want to know. Gadreel had the right to his privacy.   
"I am listening."  
He didn't seem all too happy about it. 

"Metatron promised to make you a leader in Heaven. But you don't seem like the type who wants to lead." 

"I am not."

"Clearly, Metatron thought you were. So why'd you go for it?" 

"I thought - I thought a position of power would serve my cause. It would show others the scale of my efforts. It is hard to miss the second-in-command to the leader of Heaven himself; everyone would have known that I'd been the one to fight for them."  
Shame flickered in the other, and while Sam was glad to know it existed, he suddenly wished he hadn't sparked it now.  
"I was blinded, narcissistic. I am no leader. I did what I was told to without thinking it through. I follow orders, I do not give them, and I should never be granted the power to do so again." 

"It's funny," Sam said thoughtfully, "With Metatron, that's pretty much all you ever did - you followed orders. You were a passive tool to him. But with Castiel it was different, wasn't it?"

Gadreel nodded slowly.  
"Metatron never respected me. He could say anything and yet it was never a secret that he despised me. He had no more respect for my mind than he had for the rest of me, and he made sure to remind me of my worthlessness at every turn. I adjusted to it. I - I had no reason to try and please him, because the things he was asking of me went against who I am and even though I forced myself to follow his orders regardless, I got nothing in turn for it but more scorn and hatred. I do not think his adoration would have made much of a difference. Everything I did under his command was pure blasphemy, like cutting away at myself. I never wanted a part in that, but I saw no way out of it. I would not be able to explain it to you even if I tried. It felt like I was losing myself. There was nothing left. Or that was what I thought before Castiel reached out to me. It was as if suddenly I could remember I had a choice, even if it was the one hardest to make." 

"What was the thing that broke you out? I mean, you're loyal. I know that you're loyal. When Cas wanted me to tell him about you I kind of - I knew what he was going to do, or at least I thought he had plans for you. And I thought there was no chance that he'd ever get through. You give your word and you stick to it, right?" 

Gadreel's eyes turned away from Sam and scanned the room that he had to know by heart already. His vision seemed to stick to the dent in the corner of the table Sam had thrown over the night before, and Sam gave him the space to think, thumb absently sliding over the back of his palm again and again as if still worrying for the damage the earlier topic had undoubtedly left behind.  
"The one thing," the angel finally spoke, "that Metatron found to be the greatest weakness in an angel was his love and loyalty for mankind. I suspected as much for a long time, but when he said to me, eye to eye, that our very cause, the only thing worth fighting for, was _pathetic_ , I could no longer - I... do not know what I was thinking. I walked out. To this day I wonder if he meant for it to be so. It was not the first time he tried to rid himself of me. He planned it all - my capture by you, the assault on Castiel, and though he always assured me it was not his intention to harm me, I am not stupid. He did not give out any orders to my protection. To think that he knew I would walk out, bring Castiel to that cell and hopefully decease in the process myself, I do not put it past him. As much as I despise him, I have seen enough to never underestimate him."  
The sneer on the older's face told a whole lot that his words alone weren't sufficient to communicate.  
"Metatron is a true serpent, Sam Winchester. He is dangerous and though I feel shame for falling into his trap, I know now that he is a master manipulator and that I never stood a chance against him. It does not absolve me of my responsibility and the suffering I caused under his orders remains upon my conscience, but I was a victim all the same. Sometimes I wonder how much of this all he planned: he knew too much about me for it to be a coincidence that we would meet on that alley when we did. The timing was... I had nowhere to run." 

"Yeah," Sam sighed, "you know, I've thought the same thing. You were cornered and suddenly he's there? Hardly seems like a coincidence. Considering the strategic position he gained by bringing you in, I doubt it was just a lucky strike for him." 

Gadreel nodded. A shadow crossed his face and his eyes sought the next spot in the room to turn to, and Sam felt the cold dread that was weaving itself into a full tapestry inside the other.   
"And yet he lives," the angel spoke with strain in his voice, "I know those halls; I know how impenetrable the walls are. But I also know Metatron, and I do know that if _I_ managed to escape, or at least provide an escape to another, then it cannot be unthinkable that he would find a way as well. Especially if he truly planned the whole thing all along. I am trying to trust our victory, but I let that snake inside my mind. I know what he's capable of." 

"I'm getting a headache," Sam grunted, lifting a hand to press over his eyes. 

"You've had one the whole morning," Gadreel noted in a tone of suspicion. 

"I think this is about the time we stop talking about Metatron and eat breakfast," the younger announced, decisively ignoring the angel's observation, "I feel like all that coffee's burning through me and even the chemical-laced yoghurt seems like a better idea than sitting here thinking about that douchebag any more than we already did."

 

* * *

 

 

The day moved sluggishly like it was hesitant to turn towards its end. Having hung by the sentry's arm the better part of the afternoon, Sam took the time off to walk outside; he checked the premises, although he suspected he'd find nothing at all, for anything that could trigger the lockdowns. The previous night had passed without an alarm and that only served to make it stranger - if it was a system error, then by all means it should have kept happening. Seemed that there was something triggering it after all, and although Sam knew better than to hope - or fear - the nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach never left him alone for long.

He found as much as he'd expected; there was nothing that he could think of that could have been behind the triggers, and so he turned back to return to the bunker, feet heavy and dragging in the dry ground, clouds of dust appearing around the tips of his feet at each step he took. The mysterious berry-bearing bushes at the side of the path he'd walked had grown thicker since the past autumn, and for a moment Sam's mind escaped to wondering what kind of a plant it was, but he couldn't remember. Regardless, it wouldn't be bearing anything until much later in the year: he'd have the time to rediscover the species by then. Not that it mattered. For all he knew, he might not be there to see it happen. Even worse if he'd be, he realised; the thought of living for another four months seemed exhausting and pointless.

The path ended by the bunker's heavy doors: he triple-locked them behind his back and climbed down the metal stairs with relative lightness of steps, at least in comparison to how heavy he'd walked outdoors. The hall still echoed with emptiness and although it remained welcoming like a friend's embrace, it seemed melancholic and lonely and the sound of his footsteps only served to make it more so. He was shivering before he reached the stairway up to the living quarters, but he walked right past it despite the feeling of heaviness dragging him towards the upstairs direction. They'd need to eat something sooner or later and now that Sam was here, nothing was stopping him from turning the oven on for the frozen pizzas he'd bought for days like this. He had no appetite, not after the meager breakfast earlier to the day and with the last stretch of the hangover still looming over him, but he'd need to eat - something he'd learned from the last few times his life had taken a similar turn - and even if he didn't care much for himself, he still had to feed the angel.  
Not that it mattered much to Gadreel what he ate. He could have consumed handfuls of dry oats if that was the only thing left in the kitchen and it wouldn't have bothered him much, probably wouldn't have harmed him either, but this way they both ate - both  _remembered_  to eat. It wasn't a given in Sam's state, and he suspected that Gadreel wouldn't have remembered his own needs any better than Sam did, so with each of them caring for the other at least something, sometimes, got done right.

Sam didn't remember spending this much time in the kitchen before. He'd never had to. It had rarely been him cooking - often enough he simply took from the fridge what was his and went on his way, or Dean had been there to take care of preparation and food had been available whenever Sam had needed it. He had no trouble serving his own meals, of course, and he wasn't a terrible cook for that matter either. It had been a question of arrangements and passion; one of them wanted to eat fresh, the other wanted to eat warm and filling and enjoyed the process of preparing the food as much as the results themselves. Dean could spend hours in the kitchen on the quiet days, creating meals out of ingredients Sam had regarded completely incompatible, and whenever he didn't cook, Sam still had everything he needed at hand.  
Now he was playing both roles: in the mornings he still followed his own routine. During the day he tried his best to avoid the kitchen space entirely, and he'd thus far been rather succesful at it. He would have skipped the evenings as well if it wasn't for Gadreel, so here he was now, waiting for the oven to let out that small clicking sound that would announce it was time to drop the processed and freezer burnt pizzas into the heat for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, depending on how much extra toppings he could spare for them. It didn't matter much. He was in this blind and deaf, doing everything with just one hand and half a brain. The rest of him, no matter where he was, seemed to have permanently split between existing solely as a vessel to the thoughts of Dean - just Dean, and not even some aspect of him in particular but rather the man himself in all that he was and all that he'd ever been and what Sam feared he'd become - and the thought like a vision of his own bedroom, a constant longing in the pit of his stomach to draw him back in there. A desire, in more detail, to return to the warmth, the scent and the feel of another body so close to his, to the sound of breathing and the texture of the other's skin against his own, and to the sweet oblivion of stepping out of time to simply become an extension of something bigger than the two of them.

He'd been like that with Jess, he realised; every lecture, every extracurricular, every hour in the library or with friends he'd just thought of Jess, of their little apartment, of the things they did on the long nights that now seemed like a memory he'd created, nothing more than a fantasy. It was rarely sexual, although that had definitely been an aspect to them, but rather a desire to return between the sheets with a bag of chips and a bad movie playing on the battered laptop with the broken speakers: a magical draw to the soft, light kisses and his arm around her waist. A longing to merely  _exist_  there together, close and pretending there was no world beyond them.  
It was exactly what he was doing now, and the thought made him feel cold and nervous again. All of a sudden, even though the very idea had made him sick the whole day, turning to the remaining alcohol didn't seem like the worst option on earth.  
  
What else could it be, really? He'd fallen in love in stranger ways before. So what if he didn't feel it now, if the thought was strange to him? It meant nothing. What he wanted spoke a whole different language from what he thought he didn't want.

With weak, numb legs Sam stood up and walked to the oven to check the temperature: it was close enough for him, anything to not sit there in the corner in the company of his own inactivity and silence for a moment longer. His fingers were stiff and cold and his hands as unreliable as he felt his feet to be when he started piling the extra toppings, but this wasn't rocket science. This was just dinner, and even though more ground cheese landed on the table than he ever seemed to get on his mark, he did survive the ordeal.  
Once the oven's door was closed again and his phone was set to remind him to take the food out in time, he had to face the true effects that the thoughts were having on him: his feet were rooted to the ground and he couldn't seem to budge. The warmth that radiated from the stove in front of him made his jeans burning hot against his thighs but how could he move now, how could he possibly take these thoughts upstairs with him and risk slipping them to Gadreel? He couldn't.   
Still shaky, Sam leaned his back to the counter and breathed.  
He had to face it, one way or another; there was no other explanation than that he  _was_ , somehow, irrationally and unexpectedly, falling for the angel. The thought felt wrong however, and not in the way that he could reason with. For one, the feeling wasn't about any sudden surfacing of repressed homophobia, which was the first suggestion his mind threw at him. The vessel's sex was insignificant in the context, and so was the fact that this wasn't a human he was thinking of, although the thought of taking things further with an  _angel_ was terrifying indeed. Instead, it was a deep-seated gut feeling that he was wrong about this, the whole of it, but how could he possibly be? What else drove people into desiring such intimacy and closeness with others than romantic love, if he didn't feel at all sexually attracted to the older? And he did not: that was the one thing he still remained absolutely certain of. There was nothing inherently unattractive about Gadreel, if not for the fact that he was, in fact, in a male body. He was beautiful and that wasn't something Sam had never taken note of; he was straight, not blind. And even then Gadreel wasn't someone the younger wanted to... gods, he  _really_  didn't want to. The thought alone was too much.

Did that matter?  
Was it off limits to try?  
Who would he ever have to answer for it to?  
There was no one else here. No one but them.  
No one would ever know. 

The last remaining questions were if it would hurt them, if it would break something - and most pressingly, if it wasn't what he needed, then what on earth was  _this_?


	9. A New Beginning

* * *

 

Night crept in much faster than afternoon had died. It fell as heaviness in Sam's limbs, an early warning to the fact that he'd used up whatever energy remained to himself, and that sleep would come to him fast should he just choose to let it in.  
This was the second shower he'd taken the same day, but with all the cold sweat his body had cleansed itself with, it couldn't have come to a more dire need. The water washed away more than just the filth, however. It took away some of the tension and the constant fear-tinted nervousness that he could never quite figure out if he experienced as the positive or the negative kind, leaving him with just flashes of anxiety and the sense of impending doom, as if he was once more the boy responsible for the whole world and not just himself.  
But tonight, his worries were uncommonly common, even if the usual craziness still coloured the picture in. One move and he'd know, one way or the other. For some reason, Gadreel's reaction wasn't the one he was worried for: there wasn't any fear of rejection in him, and he didn't really know why it was so. He'd half-heartedly tried to look into that matter but couldn't, as every time the all-consuming anxiety for what he'd already decided to go through with flooded in and took away the concentration he'd managed to pull together for logical thinking. 

As if preparing himself for the last task of the day, Sam took his time drying off in the steam-filled bathroom. He wore the shirt and the soft cloth pants that he'd intended to sleep in, brushed his teeth for twice as long as usual just to stall a little while longer, and when there was nothing else for him to do, he finally moved to the door, drew in a deep breath and walked out. The hinges creaked, and in the long corridor it sounded louder than he'd expected. Cool air pushed into his hair as he crossed the space to his bedroom door and found it ajar as he'd left it; he barely cast a glance at Gadreel when he entered, instead heading first to make sure there were no new messages on his phone and no new email on the laptop. It was easier to sit on the bed with them than on his own, but since there was nothing, the relief of it expired quickly, leaving behind the pressure of knowing that he was running out of excuses, out of things to stall the inevitable with.  
When he stood to return the laptop on the table where it usually lay whenever unused, he was surprised to hear the angel do the same and then walk to him. Sam couldn't bear to look at him, but right there and then his heart was racing almost painfully hard and he felt frozen on spot - how to initiate it? What was he supposed to do? 

"You seem on edge."

Gadreel's fingertips were warm against the side of Sam's hand, and as they slid almost effortlessly over the younger's palm and caught it in his grip, the rest of his hand was much warmer than Sam felt in his entire body. It was such a comical situation: completely different in mood than what it seemed like - what the joining of their hands made it seem like. The tone of the older's voice was casual, not worried, perhaps slightly exhausted at most, and Sam was still staring at the table or the corner of the laptop, unable to think clearly. 

"Yeah. Yeah, I've been - I've been thinking a lot, that's all."

It shouldn't have been this hard. He turned; he was already turning by the point he realised he really did not want to. With his back straight they were eye to eye, and that made the whole thing twice as hard. Who was this person standing in front of him?  
It seemed like he knew everything about Gadreel, yet he'd barely scratched the surface.  
As he looked at the older and prepared, thinking of all those things and of what he was about to do Sam realised that there wasn't an inkling of any of the feelings he'd learned to associate with this moment, the one in which all the tension should have finally come together and built up until it was nearly unbearable, but that didn't matter; it wasn't proof enough. 

The twitch - the half-crease of the older's brows - was enough to tell Sam he'd just slipped the plan, made the initiation he'd so feared without speaking a word or consciously thinking of anything at all. It was now or never, so he took that one final breath and went with whatever his instinct would provide him with.  
His body tilted forwards, the motion mainly toned by utter bafflement, and although he tried hard not to think of anything, his mind was filled to the brim with questions that were loading up on one another. And right there against him was the most quiet silence he'd ever listened to, a pause in a living being just waiting for the contact that would come, and came. 

Sam realised it probably should have felt like something special. What it did feel like was a series of observations; Gadreel's lips were soft, the front dry and warm and the inner side cool rather than anything. His arm, upon which Sam found his free hand resting, was relaxed and the skin on it felt shower-fresh, not as soft as it would have been if the water hadn't dried it out. The breath that hit Sam on the upper lip was a short blow, the latter half of a gasp that he hadn't felt happening, and it seemed that their faces were entirely incompatible - the rough stubble on both caught to the other's and made moving seem like a bad idea, and there was too much jaw with nowhere to turn.  
The quiet in the older leaked with something, an incertainty as far as Sam could tell, and although the kiss had barely begun - although it had hardly been anything more than the younger's lips brushing against the other's, picking a hold of the lower one and sliding along it to the breaking point where his mouth was closing again - it now ended to the taller's snort and a step back. He brought his hand up and through his hair, cheeks flaring, a smile on him and shaking his head with such an utter feeling of relief inside him that there wasn't a match for that anywhere. 

"Yeah, no. No. Sorry."  
How the hell could he explain that?  
A lost, confused twitch of a smile crossed Gadreel's lips; his head tilted and Sam watched the array of questions run through his expression, most visible in the changes in just how much he was squinting, how deep was the frown, and how far his lips were pushing towards a proper smile. 

"I have no idea what just happened," he finally said.

"Honestly - me neither. That's, uh. I needed to - I needed to figure out - something."

"And did that help you?" 

Sam nodded.  
"Yeah, definitely." 

So, he wasn't in love.  
Then what the hell was this?

 

* * *

 

For the first time since his arrival in the bunker, Gadreel didn't sleep. The hours were longer than what he was used to but did not grow dull; he rested on his back, eyes upon the dark of the ceiling with just the laptop's battery light illuminating the otherwise impenetrable blackness around them, and Sam slept on a curl next to him, one arm around his waist and hand tangled with his, the other under his head trapping a pillow between himself and Gadreel's arm, which the older had brought over his body in a protective manner. The younger's face was pressed close to the angel's chest, forehead nearly against the pit of his arm, and that was the degree of his fetal position - it would leave him with tense muscles, but if he felt safe and comfortable that way, then he could sleep any way he wanted to.

His energy flowed freely into Gadreel, and Gadreel received it with unusual openness and relaxation. He wasn't afraid anymore, not of baring himself and not of Sam using the link between them for anything he didn't want it to be used for. It had been... nights and days, the count of which seemed to avoid him now (such things weren't meant to happen to angels, but most angels didn't stay unconscious for days in row), and there had yet to be an occasion when the older felt threatened by the man's presence in connection to him. Quite the contrary: he felt full this way, much more complete than he did on his own. With the younger's body and soul pulsing there right beside him with life and strength and the whole complex mess of emotion and thought that was sometimes hard to tell apart, especially now that he was dreaming, Gadreel felt happier than he could remember ever feeling before. It seemed that there truly was no appreciation for anything before it had first been lost. Here, now, somehow it felt like he'd not only been completely forgiven by this spectacular human being whom he'd cared for and then out of his own ignorance and selfishness lost, but also like he'd returned closer to Eden, free and unbound and full of strange potential. Like half of his sins had been undone by this week's recovery. 

His mind turned to the slowly fading scarring upon the vessel and traced out the expired sigil and the point of ignition, the holes where the stitches had been before Sam had taken them out again, and the truth that everything in the flesh seemed to have finished healing already, leaving him with the marks. It was like he'd branded himself, a sign to all that he'd been dead once, that he'd _paid_ , and this brand not only marked his flesh but his grace just the same. It also seemed to be where his pain gathered. This wasn't about the pain of injury, not anymore; with Sam there beside him, the physical pain was almost gone, almost unnoticeable, like just an ache in the vessel from strain or slow-healing injury from impact. This was the pain that had grown in him for thousands of years and which strangled him in a whole different way, made it hard for him to see purpose in his cause, or sometimes, a cause at all in the first place. It swirled like an energy anomaly around the puncture wound's scar, seeping into the cuts of the sigil to follow the trails of the sharp shard of stone that he'd carved himself with, slowly and torturously like it was mocking him for the effort.  
It was a ghost in him, and now in contrast to the vast contentness that he felt in his whole other being, the shade of it was darker than night and its long arms stetched into every part of him like stains upon a lantern. And a lantern he was: not a star anymore but a captured flame, easy for anyone to put out, but with time and some luck, he'd grow to be a firestorm again, a force of Heaven, a true guardian. It seemed a long way from here, and not only in his mind but as much was clear to those around him, but that didn't mean it would never happen. 

A year ago, he'd thought of nothing but becoming this sun. The quest had taken him further from it than he could have plausibly imagined to complete darkness instead, but somehow, he was here and the light within him had survived as well. As his grace greeted the dawn outside, once more aware of its presence, he wondered if would he have been wiser if he'd known he only had a year to live - if the knowledge of how he would end would have changed anything.  
Sam stirred beside him but only to bring his knee over Gadreel's, and somehow the older knew he wouldn't have learned anything from that knowledge. What had taught him was the experience alone, the realisation that he was lost with no way out, and the relief of someone reaching out for him and pulling him out of the dark. Now he was wiser but how, he didn't yet know. Based on how out of control he'd been the day before, he still had a long path to being half the angel he wished to be. At least he now knew that change wasn't in the name, and that his flaws and faults were not a myth tied with the lies but a real monster inside him, a creature that he had to pay attention to no matter how much it hurt, and perhaps that way he could once call himself a hero again. 

This wasn't about others anymore, not about their acceptance and forgiveness and adoration. This was about him; about the void where his cause had once resided, and about his own inability to adjust to the loss of it. He'd be better one day. He'd find worth in something new.  
Sam was right about that.

 

* * *

 

"Hey, Gadreel."

It was odd to be addressed - to be addressed so _casually_ , without the sneer or hatred attached to every letter of the name, like it was the name of a friend. The link that proved no subliminal message hidden between the lines made it only stranger still, and caused the angel's grace to jolt inside him in an attempt to reach for Sam. This was something that he'd only ever experienced with other angels, and even that had been so long ago he could barely remember what it felt like to interact on such a level. It was the most primal an angel could get, the most profound; it was a contact between his core and another's, with no conscious mind attached to the union, yet a touch like that served to provide a firm, unique basis for the rest that followed. And somehow, Sam's soul was compatible with him, something he'd never thought to be possible: it mixed with him easily and held onto him as tightly in turn like their essences weren't of different realms altogether. 

"Yes?"

Sam remained quiet, but Gadreel could feel him thinking. He didn't look further than that, expecting that what he'd find would be an incoherent mess until Sam had figured out what it was exactly that he wanted to say. In the light of the table lamp, the room seemed to bathe in sunset, but outside it was closing in on noon, and they'd yet to leave the bed. The weather outside was rainy, Gadreel could smell it in the stone that surrounded them, in the earth beyond that, and feel it in the pressure of the air. Sometimes, faintly as it was, he could have sworn he even heard the raindrops, but of course such a feat was unachievable for the ears of his vessel's. The thunder, on the other hand, could be heard _and_ felt even this far into the bunker.  
Unexpectedly he felt Sam reach in through the connection; he closed his eyes and cleared his mind, relaxing as far as he could to let it happen. Whatever the other was looking for, he allowed him to see.  
  
"You're - comfortable here, right?" 

"I am."  
And Gadreel was. He hadn't been more so anywhere. He hoped the wave of calm happiness that flooded through him was clear to Sam as well, and it probably was; he rarely flooded with anything, so the change in his aura would come as something the human would probably recognise swiftly. 

"But once you're better, you're still leaving - I mean, you have Heaven, it's your home. You probably want to go back." 

The older shifted, then turned; Sam had retreated to his own side and the connection was closed so that when he tried, he couldn't turn to see what this was all about. There was a sense of nervousness and anxiety in the other that he couldn't understand, and when Gadreel tried to look him in the eye, he avoided the gaze.   
"You are asking me if I am leaving." 

The hint of a nod that Sam gave him in response was so subtle he nearly didn't catch it. Then, finally, the younger's eyes flickered to catch his in turn.  
"It's okay, really, I just - I'm just asking. When I told you to find the door, I didn't _mean_ it the way it - ugh. I don't know, Gadreel. I just wanted to let you know that you don't have to go any sooner than you want to, that - I'm fine with you staying. As long as you need to."  
 _As long as you want to._

This didn't make much sense.  
"Are you asking me to stay?" 

"No," Sam rushed to patch his words, "No, I'm just taking back the whole thing about - I don't know what I'm saying. Let me rephrase. When I told you to leave as soon as you can walk, I didn't mean it. You can stay, if you want to, as long as it takes. Longer if you want."  
 _I have no idea what I'm saying. I don't want you to go, that's all. I really - when I'm alone, the whole place just falls on me. It's like I'm standing in an echo chamber with ghosts. When you're here, it's - man, it's better. Everything's better. And I don't know what I'll do when you go. Where I'll go. I'm afraid I'll run again, that I'm not strong enough for this. Because I don't feel strong. I feel alone and scared. That's - that's what I'm saying. That I need you. But if you want to go, I won't be holding you back. It's your home, after all. And I'm just a guy._  

It happened rather unexpectedly, and Gadreel didn't realise he'd moved before he'd already brought his arm around the younger and brushed his fingers into his tangled hair, palm pressing to the back of his head and both hands pulling him closer until his head was on top of Sam's and the rest of them was just as joined as their minds were. This wasn't a reaction from him, this was a wish from the other, a subconscious prayer that he'd answered like it was natural for him - it wasn't - but the result was that he could feel everything in the younger, the fear and the pain and the grief and the slow relief washing over him, the embarrasment, the need to stay just like this, and it felt good to be that close.  
Sam's fingers wrapped around his shirt, then, at the realisation there was not much of them that was touching directly, skin to skin - having Gadreel's chin against the top of his head wasn't counting for enough - he dragged up the hem of it and pushed his hand underneath and over the older's waist, palm adjusting gently over the shape, and they stayed in that position to just breathe, the connection wide open again so that it almost felt like they were one. 

"There's some part of me that..."  
Sam's words trailed off and Gadreel felt him shiver and swallow thickly. His fingertips dragged up along the older's skin and then fell back down, the motion turning steady and affectionate but absent at the same time. The touch seemed to leave traces behind, like something was transferred from Sam to the angel's body, something that stayed there and became a part of him in turn.  
"It's like I - like I miss having you here."  
 _How do you say 'I miss you in me' without it sounding dirty?_ the younger added after the briefest pause to think, chuckled and pushed his head against the older's chest, sighing heavily in conclusion.  
"I realised it the same night I'd thrown you out. That something wasn't there, something I - I needed, like you'd taken a part of me. The irony is that I guess, while you took nothing from me you did leave something behind and I still felt that way." 

"You carried me with you for six months. Your body alone would have to readjust, and you were still weak. I kept you alive, and when you drove me out, you left yourself weakened." 

"Yeah. Part of it was that. But I mean, I felt like - it's hard to describe. It's like I just missed the way you'd - the whole knowing, on some level, that you were there. Of course I never accepted that, but I feel better this way. Stronger, I guess. I just - I trust you. It's probably part thanks to the fact you healed me, but I trust you, completely, even if I didn't want to. And I just feel so much better like this. Like I don't have to be alone." 

"You... missed me." 

"That's what I'm trying to say."  
Sam's hand slipped further down on the older's back and pushed up between his shoulders, fingers on both sides unknowingly touching the bases of the angel's wings that now rested on the bed behind him, straightened out like he just hadn't bothered pulling them up close again.  
The touch that just remained there against his spine, flat and light, felt like there truly was nothing between them at all, no skin or flesh to separate them from one another. Slowly the man's arm relaxed and pressed against the older's body as well, half of it following the spine and the rest turning just the slightest to the side, bending from elbow to touch his waist and then finally lifting.   
"It was kind of relieving to have that back. You know, with the link. When I could feel you again, I felt whole. I don't know if I hate that. I mean, I _am_ whole already. But on the other hand, I don't know if I am." 

"I always knew I would have to leave you behind. I was only there to heal you."  
Gadreel hesitated.  
"It did not make it any easier." 

"But you had another vessel."

He nodded against the younger's head, the clean, long hair sliding underneath him, trapped in the stubble that covered his jawline.  
"I never had that kind of connection with him. It was different." 

"It's so damn weird to listen to that in the past tense." 

"I assure you, I have not yet fully accepted it myself."  
There was guilt in the words, but not as much as Gadreel had expected. The man who had allowed him in had only ever wanted peace; he'd died in Heaven, so peace was what he'd gotten, even if the secondary contract between them had essentially been broken when Gadreel had taken his life. But Gadreel had carried him through the backdoor himself - the road back home for him would be different than for most, but at least his soul was safe, and at least it was not stuck on earth. 

"So that's - yours, right? The skin you're in. Like, there's no one else there." 

"That is correct." 

Sam nodded. He'd known it, of course; he wouldn't have missed a third presence with them, there was no way an entire soul could be missed in contact like theirs. If there had been a soul there, Gadreel would have never required outside assistance in the first place: the agreement to become a vessel included the part about agreeing to provide the necessary sustenance to the angel the vessel served. But without a soul in there with him he was alone and just as dependent on others as any other being would be in a state like his. <

"It's actually a relief."  
 _I don't really know how I feel about possession. It's easy when it's me. I know how I feel about me. But I can never know about the rest, so - it's difficult. We're not just vessels. We're people._  

"I respect that," Gadreel replied to the continuation, weight on every word. 

"Yeah. I guess that's what makes you different. So to - to return to the topic we started from, you're still leaving, aren't you?"  
There was submission in the hunter's tone, but the fear had settled. Instead of it he seemed to have said everything he'd needed to, and what remained was the conclusion that lay upon Gadreel, not him.  
The angel brought his hand to the younger's shoulder and held it firmly, arm still bent over his back and the other hand as stuck in his hair as it had been the whole conversation, fingers bent around the long thick strands. 

"I do not yet know for certain. You only just told me what you wish. The only thing I can tell you is that this is as much my home as Heaven was, maybe more. I am the guardian of Eden - of humanity, Sam Winchester. I have to choose where I will go from here, whether I wish to help return order to Heaven, or if my services would be more needed here amongst your kind. I do lean towards staying; what you said to me yesterday is true. Heaven may be too much for me. I am a weak link, and a weak link is a burden to the whole chain: it is a risk we cannot afford to take. And many of my brothers and sisters certainly still remain hostile towards me for good reasons. Yet I do not know if this is my place, or if I could be accepted here any more than I am with my kind, or even if I could be useful in the slightest." 

"You'd be with me and Cas. It's okay. You're in the team already so if you want to stay, stay. I think once you've healed more, we could really use your help." 

"I have little strength to me, Sam. Projecting a blade is a task. Are you sure you can afford that?"

"Are you implying you'd rather walk out on your own? Look, Gadreel - we have an arsenal here. Blades won't be a problem. You can fight, but you'd rather be on defensive, right? That's me. I'm the defensive. I'm the front line that covers for the attack. I'm the bait, the guy who watches your back when you go out in the field. Heaven needs angels that can bring order, we need people who can hold up against whatever. I think that's more in your job description than civil war and riot control."  
Sam pushed back so that he could look Gadreel in the eye, and the angel granted him a small smile for the decisiveness in his eyes. 

"You really want me to stay," the older noted warmly. 

"Yeah. Yeah, I do." 

"Then, for the time being, I shall stay; whether that is until you no longer need me, until you no longer wish for my presence or until we decide otherwise, I will stay, and I offer what strength I have in me to you." 

The smile on the younger started as a twitch but grew quickly to a full one, the kind that he tried to swallow back but couldn't and that lit up his whole expression taking away the signs of weariness from him. He nodded, seemingly unable to find the right words for an answer, and turned on his back, arm moving from Gadreel's back to over him instead so that now he was in essence the one curled up against Sam's side. He straightened slightly to keep on level with the human's eyes, but Sam was looking at the ceiling and slowly letting go of the happiness that had briefly filled him to make room for the tasks of the day and the shadow of grief and worry that still lingered upon him as strong as ever.  
But at least he seemed more confident now, less afraid of facing it all knowing that he wouldn't have to be in it alone. And that was enough to reassure Gadreel that he'd made the right choice. No matter how he looked at it, there was no downside to staying. He was betraying no one. Castiel was right: he owed Heaven nothing that he could give it now, but on the other hand, he still owed everything to mankind. This was where he belonged.

 

* * *

 

Gadreel was the one to greet Castiel by the door. The seraph's surprise froze him in place and then lit up his weary expression with a delight that Gadreel barely had the time to register before the younger was on him and around him, arms tightly wrapped around his body and aura and wings alike taking a hold in turn. It was constraining but this time, it didn't feel bad. Awkwardly the older lifted a hand to press against the other's back, and when they finally parted, the wide smile remained upon Castiel's lips.

"You seem well," the seraph noted. 

"I feel good," Gadreel replied with a smile, head lifted and posture straight with respect for the other.  
He knew Castiel noticed, but also that he understood that unlike many others Gadreel didn't do this because he regarded Castiel as his commander. Rather, he knew it was simply for the things they'd been through together, and for what Gadreel knew rather than what he wanted Castiel to be.  
It was a different kind of respect than the idolization usually offered for the younger, and that made him feel easier in it.  
"What kind of news?"

"Not all too many," Castiel admitted as they began the descend towards the library hall, "Actually, I'm here mainly to check on you." 

Gadreel nodded.  
"I am well enough, as you have already noted. But brother, you seem better yourself." 

Castiel glanced at him and examined him for a brief moment before nodding.  
"I've had some rest. The issue yet remains unsolved but I am - functional."  
Gadreel didn't press the issue further: it seemed to be one of those things that Castiel neither wished to discuss nor wanted him to be a part of. So be it.  
  
At the end of the stairway they could see Sam waiting for them, hips and a hand leaning to the table behind him and a cup of coffee in the one he had free. He raised his head in greeting and a crooked smile appeared on him and Castiel alike, as if it was something that belonged to their meetings.

"Any news?" the angel asked straight away. 

Sam shook his head.  
"Nada. It's all on that one lead. But it's been less than a week, we just need to give it time."

Gadreel had settled to the tail of the group, the position he felt most natural to him; he followed, made sure he had the full picture, and joined only when he'd assembled a proper understanding of the situation. It felt strange to realise such preparations weren't necessary here, that he was with friends. He'd never had friends like this before. 

"Gadreel seems to have recovered better than I expected," Castiel noted when the oldest stepped into the triangle that they now formed together, glancing at him as if to acknowledge he was present when talked about. 

"I still have a long way to go," the sentry admitted, "but the worst seems to be over." 

"May I?" the seraph asked, raising his hand between them with his fingers lifted.  
For a moment, Gadreel hesitated, his whole being from wings to flesh tense and still, but then reason won over instinct and he nodded. The other angel's fingertips were cold when they pressed against his forehead and immediately Gadreel could feel his grace surging to merge with his own, and a link much like that between him and Sam was formed through which he knew Castiel was only measuring the condition he was in and nothing more. When the fingers lifted from his skin, there was a pleased look on Castiel's face and he nodded to himself.  
"You should be able to recover on your own from now on," the shortest noted in a voice that matched his expression well, and turned then to face Sam, "Which means we can break the spell now." 

Sam's brows lifted and his lips parted in surprise; he shared a quick glance with Gadreel before turning back to Castiel.  
"Are you sure?" he asked, clearly taken aback by the information. 

Castiel nodded.  
"His grace is stable and should generate enough energy on its own to keep him going."  
His eyes turned towards Gadreel again to measure him carefully.  
"You should feel similar to how you were after the fall. I understand that you were badly injured in the event and that this isn't a new condition for you." 

"It is very close to how I feel now," Gadreel agreed, but his eyes were upon Sam as he spoke, "I can recover as long as I have somewhere to stay." 

"You have many, my friend," Castiel replied to him, but he'd clearly caught up to the wordless conversation between the two and was busy squinting at them in an attempt to catch up with the details he was clearly left out of, and as a result his voice was more confused than it was warm.  
"Is there - is there something that I'm missing here?"

"Cas, look," Sam started, finally taking his eyes off Gadreel to address the seraph directly.  
He settled to sit on the table, long legs no longer touching the ground, and held his both hands over the half-emptied mug of black coffee, and Castiel tilted his head at him and then glanced at Gadreel again as if to make sure that Gadreel at least wasn't looking at him like they'd come to share some kind of a telepathic link even when disconnected from the one he knew they already shared. It could have worked in his benefit: before he'd looked, Gadreel had been watching Sam just as he was, but when he turned, the sentry's attention caught to him and never lifted again.   
  
"I think - I think the spell should stay," the hunter finished his sentence, breaking the staring contest between the angels as Castiel turned to him again. 

The angle of the seraph's head tilt grew sharper and the look on him was baffled.  
"Why?"  
  
The question dropped with so much heaviness it made Sam chuckle. A shrug followed, and he sipped his coffee before replying. Once more he shared a glance with the sentry still standing next to Castiel, and Gadreel found himself nodding ever so slightly: he felt relieved and, perhaps more than anything, moved by the younger's decision.   
"Are you sure?" he asked still, leaving Sam with two questions to answer and Castiel with even more that he hadn't yet voiced.

To this one, Sam nodded.   
"I'm sure," he said, and his voice was just that. Then he turned back to Castiel and looked at him calmly and seriously, his aura matching the expression almost to last detail, but there was the slightest hint of nervousness in it - not the alarming type but rather the excited type; the one that spoke of the decision he'd made being one that mattered to him enough for his voiced reasoning of it to concern him.  
"I mean, why not? It's not like it's hurting me. The better he gets, the less he takes from me. I just don't see a problem with leaving it in." 

"Sam, that's - there is no use for it," Castiel argued, seeming still more confused - and for a good reason, perhaps, considering that the whole deal was becoming irrelevant, and yet here Sam sat insisting he wanted to continue being Gadreel's spare battery.  
"Leaving it open means that every time you come in physical contact, the link will open." 

"Yeah. I think of it as a tactical advantage, actually. Gadreel was considering..."  
Sam's eyes flickered to the sentry again and he nodded, suddenly flaring up with nervousness himself.  
"... staying here to help me in the fight. To - get Dean back, first off, but I still have other things to do. Don't tell me the link won't come handy in that, because it will." 

Castiel sat down. No one had expected it when he pulled up the chair and sat down in it, but the implications were clear enough, and Sam couldn't hold back the smirk that crossed his lips. The seraph brushed through his hair and seemed overwhelmed and unsure which of them to stare at.   
"You sure have thought of a lot of things while I've been away," he finally said, settling to look at Sam. 

"Well, it's not like we didn't have time," Sam laughed, "We've literally been stuck together for the whole week. I'd be more worried if we didn't come up with something." 

 _We._ The word felt so good; Gadreel held onto it and the casual, light way it fell off the younger's lips, to the profound implications the whole picture of it held. He was a part of something: with someone. We: a team, an alliance, a friendship. Sam Winchester was a blessing to him, something that had come to him in an unexpected way and then remained through the worst of him, and here, now, they were inseparable in the spoken word.  
It was more important to Gadreel than anything, the sole thing he'd longed for in his prison through the never-ending centuries: some place he could belong in, someone who'd trust him and accept him. And now, it seemed, he'd found exactly that.  
He turned away and walked a few steps to make sure he was in control of the situation still, silencing the two as he went. 

"Gadreel?" Castiel called after him, more concerned than confused for the time being.  
At least he didn't sound so overwhelmed anymore. 

Gadreel stopped and turned to look at him, a lost smile on his face and expression full of the things he didn't know how to word.  
"I am fine," he said instead, " and he is right. I have made that decision. The link could prove useful in tight situations. Who knows? If he wants to keep it, I have nothing against it. It is hard to misuse, and even harder to turn against us. Communication like that has always been a major strength for angels." 

"It's not exactly the angel radio," Castiel noted, but his words were stretched and he was considering still.  
Then he turned towards Sam and nodded, just as slowly as he'd spoken but clearly enough that it called the conversation's end.  
"You have the right to that decision. And Gadreel is right, it would be very hard to use it against you, so I have no reason to try and convince you otherwise. So be it. After all, it can be undone at any other time. I'm merely concerned about - well, a shared consciousness is something that changes you. It may be a major strength for angels but, as Gadreel is very well aware of of course, when you take it away, it leaves a scar." 

Sam glanced at Gadreel and Gadreel felt like something had torn out a part of him at the memory of the deep, all-consuming solitude of the prison cell. He nodded, eyes turning to Sam; he'd hardly thought of this, because unity came so naturally to him. For Sam, it was different.  
"You spoke to me of what you felt after the possession," he said in a weary tone, "Imagine that a hundredfold. That is what you will feel if you accept the link as a part of you, and something breaks it. You won't feel like you are yourself anymore. You will feel empty. You will feel like you are nothing, that everything that you were, all that you could be, your future and your past and all that mattered, is taken from you." 

Neither Gadreel nor Castiel expected the huff that the man let out in response. 

"You think I don't know that already?" Sam asked them both although his eyes still remained on Gadreel, "I lost my brother. It's barely been a week. Dean's half of me, Gadreel - Cas - I'm nothing without him. I need him. And you stand there thinking you are the only ones who feel loss the way you do? I'm empty already. That's the only price there is, and I'm okay with it. Really, I am. That doesn't mean I'm letting Dean go, but it means I won't be closing up out of the fear that something will come and screw me up again. I'm not a child. I know what I'm doing."

Castiel nodded.  
"Fair enough."


	10. Epilogue

* * *

**Epilogue:** Dawn

 

Sam sat on the shotgun, eyes blinded by the rising sun and mind clouded by the pain in his shoulder. His fingers grasped the arm to hold it still, but the damn thing was most certainly dislocated and everything hurt.  
"Stop the car."

"Here?"

"Yeah. I can't take it. Rather here than in the motel in thirty minutes. Let's just get this damn thing back in place so I can breathe."

The Impala creaked as the breaks forced its speed down. Gadreel was a good driver, that much was certain; Sam knew he'd learned from him, and he'd learned it all very well. They drove nearly identically so in terms of travel efficiency, it didn't matter which of them was behind the wheel - they'd make the same time with the same amount of gas no matter what.  
The car climbed onto the side of the road and Sam was out in a fraction, trying to step out of the pain just as he was stepping out of the car and when the first two steps didn't work, he took two more, then one to the side and one back. Gadreel walked around the car and laid his hand lightly over the one Sam was holding over the injured shoulder, and the connection between them flared into life like a spark had been ignited: no words were needed as the angel examined the extent of the injury and then pushed the younger's hand aside.

"You are making it worse."  
His grip was firm and threatening, and Sam breathed out deep preparing for the inevitable. He'd dislocated his shoulders so many times that it was a miracle they stayed in the sockets at all, or that he could move his arms in the first place. Perhaps some of that credit didn't go to his extraordinary physique but rather to the fact that he truly had angels watching over him, although no one had ever claimed it for his case like Mary had done with Dean.

The hunter was still thinking of the fact when the sharp, awful feeling hit him - quite literally - as Gadreel pushed his shoulder back in place without a single warning crossing the space between them in any form beforehand. Some curses slid past Sam's guard and he doubled over pulling himself free of the angel's grip before he'd punch him square in the face, and walked off to get rid of the adrenaline that would soon enough be replaced by relief at the easening pain. Then would come the throbbing, consuming ache, and then the immobility. He'd been through this too many times.  
When in half a minute he felt ready to return, Gadreel was still standing right where he'd left him.

"I wish I could do more," the sentry said.  
It wasn't the first time. Sam grimaced; right in that moment, he wished the same.

"You can drive," he replied instead, the grimace turning into a grin and a small laughter.

"A fair point," Gadreel noted, but his voice still held the tone of apology underneath the seeming facade of lightness.

In five minutes they'd driven past the fields and entered an empty highway that would eventually take them to the motel. The pain and swelling in the shoulder was making a steady rise to Sam's neck and only served to cause him nausea and intense discomfort, but through it all he felt oddly content in his seat. The morning air was clear and he was alive, and so was Gadreel - the road would take them to a room that smelled of smoke and the memories of someone else's casual sex encounters, but the beds were comfortable enough and nothing felt better than knowing the lead had led up to something more and that tomorrow they'd begin the day one step closer to the finish line.

A month had passed by them on the road, which meant that it had been six weeks since the day Dean had walked out of the bunker after Sam had declared him dead and laid him on the bed that he'd assumed would be the one he would find him from the next time he'd come looking. Those six weeks felt like six years, and somehow he'd adjusted to it all, to the emptiness and the worry but perhaps more than that to _this_ , the ever-evasive concept that he thought he had finally figured out.  
His hand, the one that he could still use, pushed across the seat between them, staying to rest in the middle, and he didn't have to look to know the other's had fallen off the wheel at almost the same time. Their fingers touched and joined effortlessly, and suddenly it was easier to breathe, easier to stand the distance, easier to exist. The pain halved, and so did the weight of the night past: just as Sam had given Gadreel from his own strength, the sentry now returned the favour. Weariness lifted from the younger's limbs and even though he wasn't healing and even though he would still need his four hours once the road had taken them to the motel, the relief was instant and immense.

This was what it was. This was good.  
Nothing else mattered.

 

* * *

 

 


End file.
